“What has all that got to do with it!” Rulledge demanded.
“Nothing directly,” Wanhope confessed, “and I’m not sure that it has much to do indirectly. Still, it has a certain atmospheric relation. It is very remarkable how thoughts connect themselves with one another. It’s a sort of wireless telegraphy. They do not touch at all; there is apparently no manner of tie between them, but they communicate--”
“Oh, Lord!” Rulledge fumed.
Wanhope looked at him with a smiling concern, such as a physician might feel in the symptoms of a peculiar case. “I wonder,” he said absently, “how much of our impatience with a fact delayed is a survival of the childhood of the race, and how far it is the effect of conditions in which possession is the ideal!”
Rulledge pushed back his chair, and walked away in dudgeon. “I’m a busy man myself. When you’ve got anything to say you can send for me.”
Minver ran after him, as no doubt he meant some one should. “Oh, come back! He’s just going to begin;” and when Rulledge, after some pouting, had been _pushed down into his chair again,_ Wanhope went on, with a glance of scientific pleasure at him.
III.
“The house they had taken was rather a lonely place, out of sight of neighbors, which they had got cheap because it was so isolated and inconvenient, I fancy. Of course Mrs. Ormond, with her exaggeration, represented it as a sort of solitude which nobody but tramps of the most dangerous description ever visited. As she said, she never went to sleep without expecting to wake up murdered in her bed.”
“Like her,” said Minver, with a glance at me full of relish for the touch of character which I would feel with him.
“She said,” Wanhope went on, “that she was anxious from the first for the effect upon Ormond. In the stress of any danger, she gave me to understand, he always behaved very well, but out of its immediate presence he was full of all sorts of gloomy apprehensions, unless the surroundings were cheerful. She could not imagine how he came to take the place, but when she told him so--”