Chapter Twenty Two.
A Savant at Home.
“Why should I not ask your cousin?” I inquired earnestly. “I see by your manner that you are in sore need of a friend, and yet you will not allow me to act as such.”
“Not allow you!” she echoed. “You are my friend. Were it not for you I should have died last night.”
“Your recovery was due to Hoefer, not to myself,” I declared.
I longed to speak to her of her visit to Whitton and of her relations with the Major, but dare not. By so doing I should only expose myself as an eavesdropper and a spy. Therefore, I was held to silence.
My thoughts wandered back to that fateful night when I was called to the house with the grey front in Queen’s-gate Gardens. That house, she had told me, was the home of “a friend.” I remembered how, after our marriage, I had seen her lying there as one dead, and knew that she had fallen the victim of some foul and deep conspiracy. Who was that man who had called himself Wyndham Wynd? An associate of the Major’s, who was careful in the concealment of his identity. The manner in which the plot had been arranged was both amazing in its ingenuity and bewildering in its complications.
And lounging before me there in the low silken chair, her small mouth slightly parted, displaying an even set of pearly teeth, sat the victim—the woman who was unconsciously my wedded wife.
Her attitude towards me was plainly one of fear lest I should discover her secret. It was evident that she now regretted having told me of that strange, dreamlike scene which was photographed so indelibly upon her memory, that incident so vivid that she vaguely believed she had been actually wedded.
“So you are returning to Atworth again?” I asked, for want of something better to say.