“But, after all,” I protested, “we are very good friends. Surely I ought to help her by finding her husband?”
“When she probably knows where he is all the time!” scoffed Feng. “I don’t see what good you will do that way.”
“Anyhow,” I said shortly, “I’m not going to see her left in the lurch like this if I can help it.”
“Really, Yelverton, I don’t see what good you think you can do. We both believe she knows where he is. If that is so why should you interfere? Of course, what you tell me about the girl Day is very interesting and may throw a good deal of light on Stanley Audley’s character. But, after all, men change their minds and if Audley preferred Thelma to Marigold, there was no reason why he should not have asked her to marry him.”
“None the less, take my advice, drop the whole thing. You haven’t the shadow of a legal right to interfere. The men who lived in Half Moon Street, quite obviously a shady lot, have fled, evidently frightened of something and apparently your temporary bride is as frightened as they are. I don’t see why you should run any risk in the matter.”
“But what earthly risk do I run?” I asked. “Surely I am capable of looking after myself.”
“Considerably more risk than you imagine, unless I am very much mistaken,” he replied gravely.
I wondered for a moment whether my mysterious warning had come from the doctor himself. But what could he know about the affair? I could not read anything in his inscrutable face, but his manner certainly suggested that he was in deadly earnest, and, to my intense surprise, he suddenly let fall a remark, quite unintentionally, I believed, that, I realized with a curious suspicion, showed that he knew Thelma and her mother were living at Bexhill. Here was indeed a new complication. I made no sign that I had noticed his slip, but sat as if thinking deeply, as indeed I was.
How, and for what purpose, had he obtained that information. He had professed not to know what had happened after he had left Mürren.
The idea flashed through my mind that he and Thelma were acting in collusion to “call me off,” but this seemed so absurd that I dismissed it at once.