“Oh, if I could only warn him!” Asta cried, wringing her hands. Yet, personally, I was not thinking of the man’s peril so much as hers. If she went to Lydford, would not she also fall into the drag-net of the police?
Yet what was the mysterious charge against her—the charge which the French police had refused to reveal to me?
While she changed her dress and packed her small trunk I had a look around my engine, and an hour later, with her sitting beside me, we were already buzzing along the Salisbury road, returning by that level way I had followed earlier that morning. From Salisbury we travelled the whole day by way of Andover, Newbury, and Oxford, the same road that I had traversed in the night on my way to Bath.
It was delightful to have her as companion through those sunny hours on the road, and she looked inexpressibly dainty in her close-fitting little bonnet, fur coat, and gauntlet gloves. An enthusiastic motorist, she often drove her father’s car, which I now understood they had been compelled to abandon in the garage at Aix. The police had taken possession of it, but as both the French and English numbers it bore were false ones no clue to the address of its owner would be obtained.
Yet though she charmed me by her voice, though her sweet beauty filled my whole being and intoxicated my senses, nevertheless I somehow experienced a strange presage of evil.
Had Harvey Shaw once again exercised those precautions against disaster and managed to elude the vigilance of the great French police-agent? That was the main question in my mind as I drove the car hard, for Asta seemed all eagerness to get home. If Shaw had been unsuspicious, what more natural than that he should be followed by Tramu to that hiding-place where he assumed the rôle of country gentleman.
The autumn afternoon wore on, and I could not help noticing that the nearer we approached her home the paler and more anxious became the girl at my side. And I loved her, ah yes! I loved her more than my pen has power to describe. She possessed me body and soul. She was all in all to me.
That she was reflecting upon the letter penned by Guy almost immediately before his death I knew by her several references to it.
“I wonder what is the solution of that shadowy hand which we both have seen, Mr Kemball?” she exclaimed suddenly, after sitting in silence for some time, her eyes fixed upon the muddy road that lay before us.
“You mean the solution at which Nicholson apparently arrived?” I said.