My own suspicion was that he had already fled, yet it proved ungrounded, for at half-past two he arrived in eager haste, in a hired carriage, his car having broken down. Both doctors came forward and explained that the condition of Miss Asta had in no way improved. She was suffering from some obscure malady which they had diagnosed as affecting both heart and brain.
“Poor girl! Poor girl!” he cried, tears welling in his eyes. “Do your best for her, I pray of you both,” he added. “She’s all the world to me. Can’t we summon a specialist?”
“Sir George Mortimer, in Cavendish Square, might see her,” remarked the doctor from Northampton.
“Let’s wire to him at once,” urged Shaw, eagerly. “I accept your diagnosis entirely, yet I would like to have a specialist’s opinion.”
Both medical men acquiesced, and a telegram was dispatched to the great specialist on brain trouble.
As Redwood, seated at the library table, wrote the telegram, his close-set eyes met mine. The glance we exchanged was significant.
“How did you know of this terrible affair, Kemball?” asked Shaw, abruptly, a little time afterwards.
“I came over to invite you both to dine next Wednesday,” I said, of course concealing the secret message I had received from the woman I had grown to love.
In response, he gave a grunt of dissatisfaction, and walked down the hall in hasty impatience. Was his impatience an eagerness to hear of the poor girl’s end?
Surely that could not be, for was he not utterly devoted to her! And yet her seizure and her symptoms were exactly similar to those of poor Guy Nicholson!