Then, having caught mine for that moment, the eye was attentively fixed on our host again. You see how preposterous it was already. Esdaile apparently could notice a trifle like the dust on Rooke's clothes, but he seemed to be both blind and deaf to everything else—the soft surging murmurs of the crowd outside, the voice of the Inspector in the garden, the shadows of strangers across the French windows. He just dropped heavy stone jars to the floor, talked about wool-gathering, and had not even thought of extinguishing the candle that was melting and guttering in his hand. Wool-gathering—Philip Esdaile, the least woolly-minded of men! [Pg 26] [Pg 26] Already I was certain that he was deliberately acting, and acting far from well at that. It was little Alan, the elder of the two boys, who broke the spell that seemed to have benumbed us all. He ran forward, his blue-and-white check smock against his father's knees and his little face upturned. "A naeroplane, daddy!" he cried eagerly. "Some men fell out of a naeroplane close to Jimmy and me, didn't they, Auntie Joan? In a parachute, bigger'n this room!" The little arms were outstretched to their widest reach. "Do come quick and look, daddy!" And he seized his father's hand. Again I caught Hubbard's eye. Esdaile was at it again, this time with a badly-exaggerated gesture of astonishment. He might have made just such a gesture if Alan had told him that the Grandmother in the bed was really a Wolf—good enough for children but not for anybody else. Hubbard at any rate thought that this had lasted long enough. "Do you mean to say that you didn't feel the whole house shake half an hour ago?" he demanded. Esdaile turned, but with a curious reluctance that I didn't understand. "I did fancy I heard a noise of some sort," he admitted. "What about it?" Hubbard gave it to him plain and unvarnished, for all the world as if he had been in the Admiral's office with a sentry with a bayonet at the door.
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