“Oh, indeed?” she said rather nervously. “And what has been the matter with your friend?”
It was the question I wanted.
“Didn’t I tell you?” I said. “It was smallpox.”
My ruse proved even more successful than I had anticipated. Miss Thorold literally sprang to her feet, gathered up her satchel and umbrella, and with the hurried remark: “How perfectly monstrous—keep well away from me!” she edged her way round the wall to the door, and, calling to me from the little passage: “I will ring you on the telephone,” went out of the flat, slamming the door after her.
But where was Vera? How could I discover her? I was beside myself with anxiety.
The Houghton affair created more than a nine days’ wonder. The people of Rutland desperately resent anything in the nature of a scandal which casts a disagreeable reflection upon their county. I remember how some years ago they talked for months about an unpleasant affair to do with hunting.
“Even if it were true,” some of the people who knew it to be true said one to another, “it ought never to have been exposed in that way. Think of the discredit it brings upon our county, and what a handle the Radicals and the Socialists will be able to make of it, if ever it is discovered that it really did occur.”
And so it came about that, when I was called back to Oakham two days later, to attend the double inquest, many of the people there, with whom I had been on quite friendly terms, looked at me more or less askance. It is not well to make oneself notorious in a tiny county like Rutland, I quickly discovered, or even to become notorious through no fault of one’s own.
Shall I ever forget how, at the inquest, questions put to me by all sorts of uneducated people upon whom the duty devolved of inquiring into the mysterious affair connected with Houghton Park?
I suppose it was because there was nobody else to question, that they cross-examined me so closely and so foolishly.