no jest. The poor girl could scarcely speak for sobs. She mistook me for you, of course.”
“Oh!” said I grimly, “well, I suppose I must go. Broken leg, you said?—and my surgical bag, splints and so forth, are at home!”
“My dear Petrie!” cried Eltham, in his enthusiastic way—“you no doubt can do something to alleviate the poor man’s suffering immediately. I will run back to your rooms for the bag and rejoin you at 280, Rectory Grove.”
“It’s awfully good of you, Eltham—”
He held up his hand.
“The call of suffering humanity, Petrie, is one which I may no more refuse to hear than you.”
I made no further protest after that, for his point of view was evident and his determination adamant, but told him where he would find the bag and once more set out across the moonbright common, he pursuing a westerly direction and I going east.
Some three hundred yards I had gone, I suppose, and my brain had been very active the while, when something occurred to me which placed a new complexion upon this second summons. I thought of the falsity of the first, of the improbability of even the most hardened practical joker practising his wiles at one o’clock in the morning. I thought of our recent conversation; above all I thought of the girl who had delivered the message to Eltham, the girl whom he had described as a French maid—whose personal charm had so completely enlisted his sympathies. Now, to this train of thought came a new one, and, adding it, my suspicion became almost a certainty.
I remembered (as, knowing the district, I should have remembered before) that there was no number 280 in Rectory Grove.
Pulling up sharply I stood looking about me. Not a living soul was in sight; not even a policeman. Where the lamps marked the main paths across the common nothing moved; in the shadows about me nothing stirred. But something stirred within me—a warning voice which for long had lain dormant.
What was afoot?
A breeze caressed the leaves overhead, breaking the silence with mysterious whisperings. Some portentous truth
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