Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/97

 following morning, the three of them, abroad, and once there how was he to effect any sort of rescue?

The girl was apparently quite legally married and, although the horrible young Crispin had been silent and sinister, there were no signs that he was positively cruel. The deeper Harkness looked into it the more he was certain that the secret of the whole mystery lay in the older Crispin—it was of him that the girl was terrified rather than the son. Harkness did not know how he was sure of this, he could trace no actual words or looks, but there—yes, there, the centre of the plot lay.

The man was strange and queer enough to look at, but a more charming companion you could not find. He had been nothing but amiable, friendly and courteous. His attitude to his daughter-in-law had been everything that any one could wish. He had seemed to consider her in every possible way.

Harkness, with his American naïveté of conduct, was fond of the word "wholesome," or rather, had he not spent so much of his life in Europe, would have found it his highest term of praise to call his fellow-man "a regular feller!" Crispin Senior was not "a regular feller" whatever else he might be. There had, too, been one moment towards the end of dinner when a waiter, passing, had jolted the little man's chair. There had been for an instant a glance that Harkness now, in his general survey of the situation, was glad to have caught—a glance