have gone?" asked Claudia, turning to me. "They can't have run away surely? Not both of them?"
"Doesn't look like it, does it?" put in Augustus.
"If they have gone away it's for an excellent reason," said Isobel.
"Best of reasons," agreed Augustus.
"Quite the best, Claudia," said I, looking at her. "If they have 'run away,' as you said, it is to turn suspicion away from the house and everybody in it, of course."
"Oh, of course," agreed Augustus again.
"Just what they would do," said Isobel quietly.
"It would be like Michael," said Claudia in a low voice, and getting up, went quickly out of the room.
"And Digby," added I, as she did so.
Augustus departed soon after, with a malicious "Up you go" to me, and a jerk of his thumb in the direction of Aunt Patricia's room. Our recent roughness and suspicion evidently rankled in his gentle breast.
As soon as we were alone, I turned to Isobel, who sat beside me, put my arms round her and gave and received a long kiss.
"Come out to the Bower a minute, darling," said I, and we scuttled off together.
There I crushed her to my breast and kissed her lips, her cheeks, and eyes, and hair, as though I could never have enough, and never stop.
"Will you love me for ever, darling?" I asked. "Whatever may happen to us, or wherever we may be?"
She did not reply in words, but her answer was very satisfying.
"Aunt wants me," then said I, and bolted back to the house. But I had no intention of seeing Aunt Patricia.
Mine should be the more convincing rôle of the uneasy, trembling criminal, who, suddenly sent for, finds he has not the courage to face the ordeal, and flees before the ominous sound of the summons.
I was very glad this had happened, as it would appear to have given me the cue for flight.
When first sent for, I was found, peacefully eating my breakfast in fancied security. When again sent for, I should be missing--obviously terrified of the command and guiltily afraid to obey it.
Going to my room, I took my attaché-case from the wardrobe, pocketed a photograph of Isobel, and went quietly down the service staircase that debouched by the luggage-lift in a passage opening into the outer hall. In a minute I was across the shrubbery and into the drive at a bend which hid it from the house.
Twenty minutes' walking brought me to the station, where I booked to Exeter. That would not tell anybody very much, for though I was perfectly well known to everybody at our local station, it would be extremely unlikely that I should be traced from so busy a junction as Exeter, in the crowd that would be booking for the morning train to Waterloo.
As I waited on our platform, I was conscious of an almost unbearable longing to go back to Brandon Abbas and Isobel. How could I leave her like this, now, the very day after I had found her?
I felt a bigger lump in my throat than I had ever known since I was a child. It was utterly horrible.
But for the excitement and adventure of the business, I think I should have succumbed to the longing to return. But when two loving people part, one going on a journey, it is always the departing one who suffers the less.
It is inevitable that the distractions of travel, movement, change, shall drug the pain to which the other is equally exposed without the amelioration of mental and bodily occupation.
So, between my mind and the agony of separation from Isobel came the deadening and protecting cloak of action and of the competing thoughts of other matters--journey's end, the future, money, Paris, Algeria, the probabilities of finding Michael and Digby. . . .
Anyhow, I conquered the yearning to go back to her, and when the local train loafed in I got into it, with a stiff upper lip and a bleeding heart, and set out on as eventful and strange a journey as ever a man took.
Chapter III.
The Gay Romantics
"Curs'd from the cradle and awry they come
Masking their torment from a world at ease;
On eyes of dark entreaty, vague and dumb,
They bear the stigma of their souls' disease."
I remember nothing of that horrible journey from Exeter to Waterloo. It passed as a bad dream passes, and I awoke from it in London.
As has happened to others in the history of that city, I found that, in such circumstances, London was a very large place, and myself a very small and lonely atom of human dust therein.
Walking out from Waterloo Station into the unpleasing purlieus thereof, I was tempted to go to the quiet and exclusive hotel that the Brandons had patronised for very many years, and where I was well known and should feel a sense of being at home among friends.
For this very reason I resisted the temptation, and was aided to do so by the question of finance. Whatever I did, I must leave myself sufficient money for my journey to Paris and subsistence there until I should become a soldier of France, to be lodged, boarded, clothed, and paid by Madame la République.
The first thing to do was to convert my disposable property into cash, a distasteful undertaking, but essential to further progress along the path I had elected to follow. If I had to do nothing more unpleasant than that, I told myself, as I walked along down a mean street toward Westminster Bridge, the said path would be no thorny one.
And, at that moment, my eye fell upon what I took to be the very place I wanted--a pawnbroker's shop, stuffed to bursting with a most heterogeneous collection of second-hand merchandise, ranging from clothing and jewellery by way of boxing-gloves, guns, knives, meerschaum pipes and cigar-holders, cameras, umbrellas and walking-sticks, field-glasses, portmanteaux, to concertinas, cornets, and musical instruments of every description.
I entered and found a young gentleman, of markedly Hebraic appearance, behind the counter. I expected to hear him say:
"Vat d'ye vant, Mithter?" and waggle his hands, palms upwards, near his shoulders, as I remembered a song, last heard at Oxford, anent one Solomon Levi and his store at Chatham Street.
For some reason, best known to himself, he wore a bowler hat of proportions so generous that it rested upon the nape of his neck and his ears, depressing the latter well-developed organs, so that they drooped forward as droops the tired lily--though in no other way did they suggest that flower.
To compensate for the indoor wearing of this outdoor garment, he had discarded his coat, exposing shirt-sleeves that again did not suggest the lily. A very large watch-chain adorned a fancy waistcoat that was certainly worn by him at meal-times also, and his diamond tie-pin bore testimony to his financial solidity and to his taste.
I fear I looked at him for a few seconds longer than good manners could
