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Page 53
"Suppose we find Mark?" said Antony quietly.
"I say, do you really think he's there?"
"Suppose he is?"
"Well, then, there we are."
Antony walked over to the fireplace, knocked out the ashes of his
pipe, and turned back to Bill. He looked at him gravely without
speaking.
"What are you going to say to him?" he said at last.
"How do you mean?"
"Are you going to arrest him, or help him to escape?"
"I--I--well, of course, I--" began Bill, stammering, and then
ended lamely, "Well, I don't know."
"Exactly. We've got to make up our minds, haven't we?"
Bill didn't answer. Very much disturbed in his mind, he walked
restlessly about the room, frowning to himself, stopping now and
then at the newly discovered door and looking at it as if he were
trying to learn what lay behind it. Which side was he on, if it
came to choosing sides--Mark's or the Law's?
"You know, you can't just say, 'Oh er hallo!' to him," said
Antony, breaking rather appropriately into his thoughts.
Bill looked up at him with a start.
"Nor," went on Antony, "can you say, 'This is my friend Mr.
Gillingham, who is staying with you. We were just going to have
a game of bowls.'"
"Yes, it's dashed difficult. I don't know what to say. I've
been rather forgetting about Mark." He wandered over to the
window and looked out on to the lawns. There was a gardener
clipping the grass edges. No reason why the lawn should be
untidy just because the master of the house had disappeared. It
was going to be a hot day again. Dash it, of course he had
forgotten Mark. How could he think of him as an escaped
murderer, a fugitive from justice, when everything was going on
just as it did yesterday, and the sun was shining just as it did
when they all drove off to their golf, only twenty-four hours
ago? How could he help feeling that this was not real tragedy,
but merely a jolly kind of detective game that he and Antony were
playing?
He turned back to his friend.
"All the same," he said, "you wanted to find the passage, and now
you've found it. Aren't you going into it at all?"
Antony took his arm.
"Let's go outside again," he said. "We can't go into it now,
anyhow. It's too risky, with Cayley about. Bill, I feel like
you--just a little bit frightened. But what I'm frightened of I
don't quite know. Anyway, you want to go on with it, don't you?"
"Yes," said Bill firmly. "We must."
"Then we'll explore the passage this afternoon, if we get the
chance. And if we don't get the chance, then we'll try it
to-night."
They walked across the hall and out into the sunlight again.
"Do you really think we might find Mark hiding there?" asked
Bill.
"It's possible," said Antony. "Either Mark or--" He pulled
himself up quickly. "No," he murmured to himself, "I won't let
myself think that not yet, anyway. It's too horrible."
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