Roddy Homfray strove to recall the salient points of the woman’s male companion, and as far as his recollection went he described them.
“Yes,” said the rector, his grey brows knit.
“It may have been Gordon Gray! But why did they make that secret attack upon you, if not in order to injure me?”
“Because I discovered the girl in the wood. They evidently intended to cover all traces of the crime. But how did they come to Welling Wood at all?”
His father remained silent. He had said nothing of the woman’s secret visit to him, nor of Gray’s presence in the church on that Sunday night. He kept his own counsel, yet now he fully realised the dastardly trap set for his son, and how, all unconsciously, the lad had fallen into it.
Only that afternoon Doctor Denton had called, and they had taken tea together. In the course of their conversation the doctor had told him how, when in London on the previous day, he had gone to an old fellow-student who was now a great mental specialist in Harley Street, and had had a conversation with him concerning Roddy’s case.
After hearing all the circumstances and a close description of the symptoms, the specialist had given it as his opinion that the ball of fire which Roddy had seen was undoubtedly the explosion of a small bomb of asphyxiating gas which had rendered him unconscious. Afterwards a certain drug recently invented by a chemist in Darmstadt had, no doubt, been injected into his arms. This drug was a most dangerous and terrible one, for while it had no influence upon a person’s actions, yet it paralysed the brain and almost inevitably caused insanity.
Roddy was practically cured, but the specialist had expressed a very serious fear that ere long signs of insanity would reappear, and it would then be incurable!
It was that secret but terrible knowledge of his son’s imminent peril that old Mr Homfray now held. His enemies had triumphed, after all!
And this was made the more plain when three hours later he woke up to find his son in his room, chattering and behaving as no man in his senses would.