“Over this last case?”
“I can do no more than the police are doing,” he said, “and Carver seems to have lost hope, though he is a deceptive bird.”
“No clue of any kind has been discovered?”
Tab hesitated here. He had promised Carver that he would not speak of the new pins, but perhaps the restriction was confined only to the printed word.
“The only clues we have,” he said as he sat down by her side under the big maple, “are two very bright and very new pins which we found, one in the passage after the first murder, and one just inside the vault after the second. Both were slightly bent.”
She looked at him thoughtfully.
“Two pins?” she repeated slowly. “How strange—have you any idea of the use that was made of them?”
Tab had no idea, neither had Carver.
“The murderer was, of course, the Man in Black,” she said. “I read an account of the case, particularly Mr. Stott’s statement—he is the scared little man who ran away when Yeh Ling and I went to search the house for our papers. Yes, I say ‘our’ advisedly.”
“By-the-way, did Yeh Ling really find what he wanted?”
She nodded.
“And what you wanted?”
She bit her lips.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I think he did and is keeping it from me. He swears that there was nothing of interest to me, but I believe he is being—kindly reticent. Some day I am going to have it out with him.”
The hand that was nearest to him was playing with a twig on the seat, and summoning his courage, he took it in his own and she did not resist.
“Ursula, it isn’t easy—you’d think that a man with my enormous nerve could take the hand of a woman—that he loved—without his heart going like an aeroplane propeller, wouldn’t you?”
She did not answer.
“Wouldn’t you?” he repeated desperately. He could think of nothing else to say.
“I suppose so,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “And you’d think that an actress who had been made love to eight days a week, counting matinees, for years on end, could carry through a scene like this without having an insane desire to burst into tears. If you kiss me, Turner will see you.”
Tab could never remember that moment very clearly. He had a ridiculous recollection that her nose was cold against his cheek, and that in some miraculous fashion a whisp of hair came between their lips.
“Lunch is served, madam,” said Turner awfully.
He was an elderly, grim-looking man, and apparently he did not trust himself to look at Tab.
“Very well, Turner,” said Ursula with extraordinary courage and coolness. And when he had gone: “Tab, you have realised poor Turner’s worst fears; he told me that I was the first actress he had ever taken service with, and I gather he looks upon the experiment as a dangerous one.”
Tab was a little breathless, but he had his line to say.
“The only thing that can save your character, Ursula, is an immediate marriage,” he said boldly, and she laughed and pinched his ear.
The confusion of Tab’s recollections of that day, extended to the golden hours which followed. He came back to town in a desperate hurry—he was aching to write to her! He wrote and he wrote, and an expectant night editor peeped in at him and crept softly away to warn the printer that a big story of the murder was coming along (the night editor had distinctly counted a dozen folios to the left of Tab’s elbow) and it was only at almost the eleventh hour that he found he was mistaken.
“I thought you were doing the Mayfield murder. Where’s your story?” asked the indignant man.
“It is coming along,” said Tab guiltily. He stuffed the unfinished letter into his inside pocket, set his teeth and tried to fix his mind upon the crime. He would stop at the most incongruous moments to conjure up a rosy vision of that day, only to turn with a groan to. …
“… the position of the body removes any doubt there may have been as to the manner in which the man met his death. The features of the two crimes are almost identical. …”
So he wrote at feverish haste for half-an-hour, and the night editor, cutting out the superfluous “darlings” that appeared mysteriously in the copy, formed a pretty clear idea as to what Tab had been writing when he was interrupted.
Tab posted the letter, went home, and began another, this being the way of youth.
It was all a dream, he told himself when the morning came. It could not be true. And yet there was a fat envelope containing the letter he had written overnight, awaiting the post.
Tab opened the letter and added seven pages of postscript.
Later in the morning he asked Jacques, the news editor, if he believed in long engagements. He asked this casually as one who was seeking information for business purposes.
“No,” said Jacques decisively, “I don’t. I believe after a man has been two or three years on a newspaper he gets stale, and ought to be fired.”
Tab had not the moral courage to explain the kind of engagement he meant.
That day the weather broke. The rain shot down from low-hanging clouds, the temperature fell twelve degrees. Nevertheless, he thought longingly of the garden of Stone Cottage. It would be snug under the trees, snugger still in that long, low-ceilinged sitting-room of hers. Tab heaved a deep sigh and strolled off to fulfil his promise to Rex.
Rex was full of his new scheme, and dragged his visitor into the bedroom where blue prints and maps and plans seemed to cover every available surface.
“I’m going to build a veritable mansion of the skies,” he said, “I have chosen the site. It is just this side of where Ursula Ardfern has her cottage. The only rising ground in the country.”
“I know the only hill in that part of the world,” said Tab with sudden interest, “but unfortunately you have been forestalled,
