"Would you like to see him, miss?"
"Yes."
Her throat closed on the word and choked it.
Down at the end of the passage, where it was dark, a door opened, the
door of the surgery, and a man came out, went in as if to look for
something, and came out again.
As he moved there in the darkness she thought it was the strange
doctor and that he had come out to forbid her seeing Rowcliffe. He
would say that she mustn't risk the infection. As if she cared about
the risk.
Perhaps he wouldn't see her. He, too, might say she mustn't risk it.
While the surgery door opened and shut, opened and shut again, she saw
that her seems him was of all things the most unlikely. She remembered
the house at Upthorne, and she knew that Rowcliffe was lying dead in
the room upstairs.
And the man there was coming out to stop her.
* * * * *
Only--in that case--why hadn't they drawn the blinds down?
XXIX
She was still thinking of the blinds when she saw that the man who
came towards her was Rowcliffe.
He was wearing his rough tweed suit and his thick boots, and he had
the look of the open air about him.
"Is that you, Miss Cartaret? Good!"
He grasped her hand. He behaved exactly as if he had expected her. He
never even wondered what she had come for. She might have come to say
that her father or one of her sisters was dying, and would he go at
once; but none of these possibilities occurred to him.
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