“Yes, do,” urged Roddy. “It’s most important to me.”
And then he slipped back down the steps and strolled along Park Lane, full of strange reflections.
That woman! It was the same woman of his hideous nightmare—the dark-faced woman who had held him beneath her evil influence, and forced him to commit some act against his will. But exactly what act it was he could not for the life of him recall. Sometimes he had an idea that he had been forced into the committal of a terrible crime, while at others the recollections all seemed so vague and fantastic that he dismissed them as the mere vagaries of an upset mind.
But he had found the woman. She was a friend of the Sandys! And did not Elma hold the photograph of the girl Edna, whom he had discovered in Welling Wood? The circumstances were more than strange!
A quarter of an hour later he returned to the house, and on slipping a ten-shilling note surreptitiously into the hand of the servant the latter said:
“The gentleman’s name is Mr Bertram Harrison, and the lady—a widow—is Mrs Freda Crisp.”
“Freda Crisp?” he echoed aghast.
“Yes. That’s the name Mr Hughes, the butler, told me,” the flunkey declared.
Roddy Homfray turned away. Freda Crisp! How amazing! That was the name of the woman against whom his father had warned him. That woman was undoubtedly his enemy. Why? Could it be possible that she was Elma’s enemy also? Was it possible that Elma, with the knowledge of the girl Edna, who had died in the wood and so mysteriously disappeared, suspected that handsome dark-haired woman of being implicated in the crime?
He recollected Elma’s curious reticence concerning the girl, and her refusal to make any allegations before she had ascertained and proved certain facts.