I laughed, but vouchsafed no satisfactory reply, and as we all three walked towards Wadenhoe the conversation grew animated. Jack, suppressing the truth that he had feared arrest, made it appear to Dora that he had been sent abroad on a secret mission and had been compelled to move rapidly from place to place. At breakfast he related how he had received my telegram late at night, after travelling to Asti, and had packed up and left immediately.
“But why have you not written oftener?” Dora asked. “Your letters were couched so strangely that I confess I began to fear you had done something dreadfully wrong.”
I watched the effect of those innocent words upon him. He started guiltily, his thin lips compressed, and his face grew pale.
“You are not very complimentary, dearest,” he stammered. “I have never been a fugitive, and I hope I never shall be. I suppose the papers have been saying something about me. They always know more about one than one knows one’s self. The statements I read in my press-cuttings are simply amazing.”
“As far as I am aware the papers have not commented upon your absence,” she answered. “It was merely a surmise of my own, and, of course, absolutely absurd. Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” he answered, rather dryly.
“No, nothing,” I said; then turning to him I added: “Dora has been talking daily of you, and wondering when you would return.”
“I obeyed your commands immediately,” he observed, with an expression that was full of mystery.
“And you have acted wisely,” I said. I saw it was not judicious to continue the conversation further, therefore we rose from the table, and during the morning I left Dora and her lover to wander in the garden and talk together.
After luncheon, on the pretext of playing billiards, I took Jack alone to the billiard-room, where I knew we should be undisturbed. Instead of taking up the cues we sat together smoking in the deep old-fashioned bay-window that overlooked the broad pastures and the winding Nene.