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this, it was distinctly noticeable that she was nervous and ill at ease,
that there was a hunted look in her eyes, and that, as the day wore on,
these things seemed to be accentuated. More than that, there seemed
added proof of the truth of young Bawdrey's assertion that she and
Captain Travers were in league with each other, for that day they were
constantly together, constantly getting off into out-of-the-way places,
and constantly talking in an undertone of something that seemed to worry
them.
Even when dinner was over, and the whole party adjourned to the
drawing-room for coffee, and the lady ought, in all conscience, to have
given herself wholly up to the entertainment of her guests it was
observable that she devoted most of her time to whispered confidences
with Captain Travers, that they kept going to the window and looking up
at the sky, as if worried and annoyed that the twilight should be so
long in fading and the night in coming on. But worse than this, at ten
o'clock Captain Travers made an excuse of having letters to write, and
left the room, and it was scarcely six minutes later that she followed
suit.
But the Captain had not gone to write letters, as it had happened.
Instead, he had gone straight to the morning-room, an apartment
immediately behind that in which the elder Mr. Bawdrey's collection was
housed, and from which a broad French window opened out upon the
grounds, and it might have caused a scandal had it been known that Mrs.
Bawdrey joined him there one minute after leaving the drawing-room.
"It is the time, Walter, it is the time!" she said, in a breathless sort
of way, as she closed the door and moved across the room to where he
stood, a dimly seen figure in the dim light. "God help and pity me! but
I am so nervous, I hardly know how to contain myself. The note said at
ten to-night in the morning-room, and it is ten now. The hour is here,
Walter, the hour is here!"
"So is the man, Mrs. Bawdrey," answered a low voice from the outer
darkness; then a figure lifted itself above the screening shrubs just
beyond the ledge of the open window, and Cleek stepped into the room.
She gave a little hysterical cry and reached out her hands to him.
"Oh, I am so glad to see you, even though you hint at such awful things,
I am so glad, so glad!" she said. "I almost died when I read your note.
To think that it is murder--murder! And but for you he might be dead
even now. You will like to know t
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