Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/173

Rh "A friend?"

"Mr. Beever. A friend of Miss Armiger's," he promptly added.

Still showing nothing in his face, Dennis perhaps showed something in the way that, with his eyes bent on the carpet and his hands interclenched behind him, he slowly walked across the room. At the end of it he turned round. "If I have this key, who has the other?"

"The other?"

"The key that confines Mr. Bream."

The Doctor winced, but he stood his ground. "I have it." Then he said as if with a due recognition of the weight of the circumstance: "She has told you?"

Dennis turned it over. "Mrs. Beever?"

"Miss Armiger." There was a faint sharpness in the Doctor's tone. It had something evidently to do with the tone in which Dennis replied. "She has told me. But if you've left him"

"I've not left him. I've brought him over."

Dennis showed himself at a loss. "To see me?"

The Doctor raised a solemn, reassuring hand;