“Oh!” she exclaimed, and then, recovering from her surprise, “your ankle is worse!”
She ran down the steps to help me climb them. As she came I noticed that something heavy was sagging and swinging in the right-hand pocket of her grey flannel jacket.
With one hand under my elbow, the other arm across my back, she helped me up the steps and across the porch. That assured me she didn’t think I had tumbled to the game. If she had, she wouldn’t have trusted herself within reach of my hands. Why, I wondered, had she come back to the house after starting downhill with the others?
While I was wondering we went into the house, where she planted me in a large and soft leather chair.
“You must certainly be starving after your strenuous night,” she said. “I will see if—”
“No, sit down.” I nodded at a chair facing mine. “I want to talk to you.”
She sat down, clasping her slender white hands in her lap. In neither face nor pose was there any sign of nervousness, not even of curiosity. And that was overdoing it.
“Where have you cached the plunder?” I asked.
The whiteness of her face was nothing to go by. It had been white as marble since I had first seen her. The darkness of her eyes was as natural. Nothing happened to her other features. Her voice was smoothly cool.
“I am sorry,” she said. “The question doesn’t convey anything to me.”