Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/290

280 thought of her being confronted by two inquisitorial old tyrants who had stumbled across the new secret of her life. Their power to harm her was already gone. He would see to that promptly enough. But their power to make that day one of unhappiness for her remained still with them. He asked himself if she could possibly need him. And once that question had been put, his disquieted soul wondered if through the clairvoyance of passion she was not striving to reach him at that very moment, if she was not calling to him through the hot and lonely afternoon.

He put a sudden end to those questionings and his own mounting unrest. He did so by climbing into his car and starting out for the Keswick home, and he was racing before he was half-way there as though some etheric summons kept reminding him that he must make up for lost time.

When he arrived there he found the gate nailed up. This disturbed him, but it did not deter him. He promptly removed a moldering picket from the fence which ran beside the overgrown cedar hedge, crept