“One seat,” said Lady Edna swiftly.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am. I thought you said the gentleman was going with you.”
“One seat. I said I was meeting a gentleman.”
The porter wheeled off the luggage. Lady Edna turned to follow, but her husband gripped her viciously by the wrist.
“Not yet.”
“Drop that,” growled Baltazar.
Donnithorpe released her, plunged his hand into his breast pocket and drew out a couple of sheets of paper.
“You did say two seats. You meant to go off with him. There’s some damned trickery about it. But I’ve got the whip hand, my lady. Just look at this before you go.”
Lady Edna turned ghastly white and clutched Baltazar’s arm to steady herself from the sickening shock. In the desperate rush, after Godfrey’s departure, the scheming, the packing, the telephoning, the temporary straightening of affairs, the chase over London for the complaisant friend whose connivance was essential, the eagerness to get free of the house before her husband should return, she had forgotten the scrap of paper in her secret drawer, with its obsolete information. Now the horror flashed on her. Her husband had gone to the drawer before. Hence the article in Fordyce’s paper. Her first instinct had been right. He had gone to the drawer again. Her swaying brain wondered how he had discovered the secret of the spring. But he had found the paper which in her folly she had not destroyed—and what else besides? She heard, as in a dream, her husband saying:
“If he isn’t your lover, what about these? Here’s proof. Here’s a matter of court-martial and gaol.”