man at once and question him.”
“But he isn’t here. You see, directly I found that he was a sock-sneaker I gave him the boot. That’s why I went to London—to get a new man.”
“Then, if the man Meadowes is no longer in the house it could not be he who purloined my manuscript. The whole thing is inexplicable.”
After which we brooded for a bit. Uncle Willoughby pottered about the room, registering baffledness, while I sat sucking at a cigarette, feeling rather like a chappie I’d once read about in a book, who murdered another cove and hid the body under the dining room table, and then had to be the life and soul of a dinner party, with it there all the time.
My guilty secret oppressed me to such an extent that after a while I couldn’t stick it any longer. I lit another cigarette and started for a stroll in the grounds, by way of cooling off.
It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away. The sun was sinking over the hills and the gnats were fooling about all over the place, and everything smelled rather topping—what with the falling dew and so on—and I was just beginning to feel a little soothed by the peace of it all when suddenly I heard my name spoken.
“It’s about Bertie.”
It was the loathsome voice of young blighted