“Well, I don’t mean anything, my dear old boy,” laughed the girl. “You know that. What I think is that you apply yourself far too closely to it—at the Works all day and then continuing your work at home, sometimes into the early hours. You’ll injure your health if you don’t take care.”
“What are you particularly interested in discovering just now?” asked May.
In reply he explained, and found that she listened quite intelligently.
After an early dinner he took them both out to a theatre, but was unable to see them home, having to leave before the performance was over in order to catch the last train.
As he came out of the theatre a man in evening dress was standing upon the step, leisurely smoking a cigarette as though waiting for some one. As Geoffrey brushed past him, he glanced round, and was surprised to recognise in him the mysterious stranger of the hunting-field—the man known at the George, at Stamford, as Mr. Ralph Phillips. An omnibus going direct to Liverpool Street was passing at the moment, and Geoffrey jumped upon it.
The encounter was a strange one. Was it by mere accident that they had met? Or was the man Phillips awaiting May Farncombe? The incident sorely puzzled him. The pair might be lovers in secret, but their attitude when he had found them together certainly negatived such a supposition.
Back at Warley that night Geoffrey found that his father had gone to bed, so he sat in his wireless room for a long time trying some new adjustments upon the piece of apparatus he was bent upon improving. But recollections of the man Phillips kept running through his brain, so that at last he went to a drawer, and taking out some small snapshot photographs, selected one which he carried to the light and carefully examined. It was a photograph of Phillips which he had taken surreptitiously in the hunting-field. The man in hunting pink had dismounted and was leading his horse, while close beside him May Farncombe could be seen mounted, chatting with Sylvia, who was riding at her side.
“I wonder?” he muttered to himself. “I wonder what it all means? Why does he haunt the girl so? Why do they in public appear as strangers? I wonder?”
And he placed the photograph in his wallet, and turning out the lights, ascended to his room.
About ten days went by, when one evening, being in London with Maurice Peterson, one of the engineers from the Works, they looked in at the Palace Theatre after dinner. The performance was excellent, as usual, and later when they strolled into the bar the first person they encountered was the mysterious Phillips, well-dressed, and wearing a smartly-cut grey overcoat.