Part 27 (1/2)
”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 pa.s.sed between us. With mutual accord we had regarded the circ.u.mstance 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.
”You know his name?” she said, in response to my question.
”I do. But there are many circ.u.mstances connected with him which are puzzling,” I said. ”Among them is the reason of his concealment in the house of the farmer Hayes.”
”Because he feared the police, I suppose. A watch was being kept on the house in Britten Street, you say.”
”For what reason? What was the offence of the pair?”
”They were suspected--suspected of a crime,” she replied. ”But,” she added, ”their guilt or their innocence does not concern me. I alone am to be the victim,” she added bitterly, pus.h.i.+ng her hair from her brow as if its weight oppressed her.
”Then this man Logan is your enemy--eh?”
”He is not my friend.”
”He is in league with the others to encompa.s.s your ruin? Tell me the truth of this, at least.”
”I have not yet exactly decided whether he is my enemy or my friend,”
was her answer. ”Once he rendered me a very great service--how great I can never sufficiently acknowledge.”
”And now?” I asked, remembering that secret sign in the window.
”I am at a loss what to think,” was her response. ”Sometimes I believe he is working in my interests, while at others I entertain a vague suspicion that he is my enemy.”
”As he is Marie Lejeune's,” I added, looking her straight in the face.
”Her enemy--why, he's her best friend. Their interests are identical.”
”I think not,” was my calm reply. And in a few brief sentences I related to her what had transpired at the lonely Northamptons.h.i.+re farm, how a murderous attack had been made upon ”Miss Alice,” as she was there called, and how the whole of the mysterious party had afterwards made good their escape from the neighbourhood.
”This is certainly surprising to me,” she declared. ”Whom do you suppose attacked her?”