“What on earth for?” she exclaimed, in a tone of surprise. “I intended asking father to-day, when I saw him at the hospital, if the report that he intended returning to Houghton were true. He seemed so hot and restless however, that I decided not to ask him until to-morrow. I do believe he is going to get better, don’t you? But now, tell me what good do you think you will do by going out to Houghton?”
“Good?” I answered. “I don’t expect or intend to do good. No, it is merely that something—I can’t tell you what—prompts me to go again to see the place.”
“How silly!” Vera declared, as I thought rather rudely. Modern girls are so dreadfully outspoken. I do sometimes wish we were back in the days when a matron would raise her hands in dismay and exclaim: “Oh, fie!” or “Oh, la!” when a young girl did aught that seemed to her “unladylike.”
Yet, in spite of Vera’s remonstrance, I caught a train to Oakham early next morning. Sir Charles had had a restless night, the hospital porter told me on the telephone, before I started, but his condition was surprisingly satisfactory.
Then I rang up Dr Agnew.
“Don’t you think he may, after all, recover?” I inquired eagerly.
In reply the doctor said he “only hoped and trusted that he might.” More than that, he would not tell me. I gathered, therefore, that he still had serious fears.
I arrived at the Stag’s Head, in Oakham, in time for lunch. Directly after lunch I started out for Houghton in a hired car.
What a lot had happened, I reflected, as in the same car in which the chauffeur had been shot, we purred down the main street, since I had last set out along that road. What a number of stirring incidents had occurred—incidents crowded into the space of a few weeks. But at last they seemed to be coming to an end. That thought relieved me a good deal. Ah, if only—if only Thorold would recover!
The drive to Houghton from Oakham was a pretty one, past woods and rich grazing pastures until suddenly, turning into the great lodge-gates, we went for nearly a quarter of a mile up the old beech avenue to where stood the old Elizabethan house, a large, rambling pile of stone, so full of historic associations.