Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/201



found no difficulty in Hampton about being directed to the Pomeroy place. Everybody in Hampton knew the place, and the instructions he received as to how to go about finding it were explicit, to say nothing of being verbose.

He sent his car forward along the path indicated; it was a narrow path, and ordinarily a car would have trouble there, but Val’s was not that kind of a car. He smiled at the platitude—“you can drive it in places where you could never get in with a big car”—and drove merrily on his way. Nobody had told him that Jessica was down here—but if she was not down here then where was she? He hardly gave that end of it a thought, because all his theory and all his wishes proved conclusively to him that she was here. Wasn’t that glorious sunlight? And the blue haze that surrounded the tops of those distant hills—something splendid about that, wasn’t there? And the woods, and the chattering squirrels, and the leaves beginning to turn such gorgeous colors! Why, of course Jessica was down here.

He thought, idly, about the hidden—or lost—Pomeroy money; but money in itself could not mean much to this modem Crœsus, so the matter was not prominent at the moment in his mind. It gave place quickly to the peculiar glint of the sunlight that he Rh