“A friend of yours?”
“No, not particularly,” was her answer.
“Then if he is not, Lolita, why did I find you walking with him in the wood on that morning—I mean after the finding of the body of Hugh Wingfield?”
“You saw us?” she gasped, glaring at me aghast. “You followed us!”
“I saw you,” I repeated. “And further, I met the man on the following night in Chelsea in company with Marie Lejeune. He was flying from the police.”
“Yes, he has told me how, by your timely warning, he was saved.”
“My warning also saved the Frenchwoman. She should, therefore, in return do you the service of telling the truth, and thus clearing you.”
“Ah! She’ll never do that, as I’ve told you. It would be against her own interests.”
“But this man? Who is he?” I demanded, recollecting the confidential conversation between them before they had parted on the edge of the wood.
Both of us remembered how she had changed her wet, muddy dress at my house, and how I had succeeded in stealing a dress from her wardrobe and carrying it down to Sibberton. Yet no word of that curious incident had ever passed between us. With mutual accord we had regarded the circumstance as one that had never occurred, nevertheless, at the cloak-room at St. Pancras was a box filled with her boots, while locked away in an attic of my house was the muddy dinner-gown she had exchanged for her walking skirt on that memorable morning.