Free Miss Silver Comes To Stay by Patricia Wentworth Page A

a little open.
    Rietta came to him and said his name. When she touched his arm it felt like a bar of steel. She looked where the hand pointed and saw the photograph which Mrs. Lessiter had been so proud of—James as she had seen him last night at Catherine Welby’s.
    In a voice that was just above a whisper Carr said,
    “Is that James Lessiter?”
    Rietta said, “Yes.”
    Still in that dreadful quiet tone, he said,
    “He’s the man I’ve been looking for. He’s the man who took Marjory away. I’ve got him now!”
    “Carr—for God’s sake—”
    He wrenched away from her hand and went striding out of the room. The door banged, the front door banged. The striding steps went down the flagged path, the gate clapped to.
    Fancy said something, but Rietta didn’t wait to hear what it was. She caught up an old raincoat from the passage and ran out by the back door and through the garden to the gate which opened on the grounds of Melling House. She got her arms into the coat sleeves somehow and ran on. How many hundred times had James Lessiter waited for her just here in the shadow of the trees?
    With the gate left open behind her she ran through the woodland and out upon the open ground beyond. Her feet knew every step of the way. There was light enough when memory held so bright a candle.
    She struck through shrubs into the drive and stood there, quieting her breath to listen. If Carr was making for the House he must come this way. He could not have passed, because he had to follow two sides of the triangle while she had cut across its base. She listened, and heard her own breath, her own thudding pulses, and as these died down, all the little sounds which go by unnoticed in the day—leaf touching leaf in a light breeze, the faint rub of one twig against another, a bird stirring, some tiny creature moving in the undergrowth. There were no footsteps.
    She walked quickly up the drive, not running now, because she was sure that Carr could not be ahead of her and it would not serve her purpose to arrive out of breath. The more reasonable pace allowed thought to clear and become conscious again. Everything between this moment and that in which Carr had banged out of the house had been governed by pure panic instinct. Now she began to take order of what was in her mind, to sort out what she was going to say to James Lessiter. She thought back to last night at Catherine’s. He hadn’t remembered Margaret’s married name—and if he had, the world was full of Robertsons. Carr Robertson had meant nothing to him. Mrs. Carr Robertson had meant Marjory, a pretty blonde girl bored with her husband. No connection at all with Melling and Rietta Cray. But last night—last night he must have known. Their words came back to her:
    “Carr Robertson… How old is the boy?”
    “Beyond being called one. He’s twenty-eight.”
    “Married?”
    “He was. She died two years ago.”
    And Catherine leaning sideways to put down her coffee-cup and saying,
    “None of us really knew Marjory.”
    He must have known then. James Lessiter must have known then.
    She came out on the gravel sweep at the front of the House. The huge square building stood up black against the sky, the light wind moved in the open space before it. All the windows were dark—not an edge to any blind, not a glow behind any curtain.
    She turned the near corner of the House where a flagged path ran between a narrow flower-bed and the hedge which presently bent back to enclose a small formal garden. Here the flower-bed ended and a clump of shrubs took its place beside the glass door leading from the study. Passing them, Rietta drew a breath of relief. The study curtains were drawn and a red glow came through them. It was plain that the room was lighted. Two steps led up to it. Rietta stood on the bottom one and knocked upon the glass. There was a moment in which she listened and heard a chair pushed back. Steps came to the window, the curtain was held aside. She could see