A Husband by Proxy Part 26

"Isn't it possible that Theodore borrowed them, temporarily, and smuggled them back when he came?"

The startled look was intensified in her eyes as she met his gaze.

"He must have done it in some such way!" she said. "I thought at the time, when I ran in to get them, they were not exactly as I had left them, earlier. And I gave them to you for fear he'd steal them!"

This was some light, at least. Garrison needed more.

"Why couldn't you have told me all about them earlier?"

She looked at him beseechingly. Some way, it seemed to them both they had known each other for a very long time, and much had been swept away that must have stood as a barrier between mere client and agent.

"I felt I'd rather not," she confessed. "Forgive me, please. They do not belong to me.

"Not yours?" said Garrison. "What do you mean?"

"I advanced some money on them--to some one very dear," she answered.

"Please don't probe into that, if you can help it."

His jealousy rose again, with his haunting suspicion of a man in the background with whom he would yet have to deal. He knew that here he had no rights, but in other directions he had many.

"I shall be obliged to do considerable probing," he said. "The time has come when we must work much more closely together. A maze of events has entangled us both, and together we must find our way out."

She lowered her glance. Her lip was trembling. He felt she was striving to gain a control over her nerves, that were strung to the highest tension. For fully a minute she was silent. He waited. She looked up, met his gaze for a second, and once more lowered her eyes.

"You spoke of--of something--yesterday," she faltered. "It gave me a terrible shock."

She had broached the subject of the murder.

"I was sorry--sorry for the brutal way--the thoughtless way I spoke,"

he said. "I hope to be forgiven."

She made no reply to his hope. Her entire stock of nerve was required to go on with the business in hand.

"You said my uncle was--murdered," she said, in a tone he strained to hear. "What makes you think of such a thing?"

"You have not before made the statement that the Hardy in Hickwood was your uncle," he reminded her.

"You must have guessed it was my uncle," she replied. "You knew it all the time."

"No, not at first. Not, in fact, till some time after I began my work on the case. I knew Mr. Hardy had been murdered before I knew anything else about him."

She was intensely white, but she was resolute.

"Who told you he was murdered?"

"No one. I discovered the evidence myself."

He felt her weaken and grow limp beside him.

"The--the evidence?" she repeated faintly. "What kind--of evidence?"

"Poison."

He was watching her keenly.

She swayed, as if to faint once more, but mastered herself by exerting the utmost of her will.

"Poison?" she repeated, as before. "But how?"

"In a box of cigars--a birthday present given to your uncle."

It was brutal--cruelly brutal--but he had to test it out without further delay.

His words acted almost with galvanic effect.

"Cigars! His birthday! My cigars!" she cried. "Jerold, you don't suspect me?"

The car was starting across the bridge. It suddenly halted in the traffic. Almost on the instant came a crash and a cry. A dainty little brougham had been crushed against another motor car in the jam and impatience on the structure. One of its wheels had lost half its spokes, that went like a parcel of toothpicks.

Garrison leaped out at once, and Dorothy followed in alarm. In the tide of vehicles, blocked by the trifling accident, a hundred persons craned their heads to see what the damage had been.

A small knot of persons quickly gathered about the damaged carriage.

Garrison hastened forward, intent upon offering his services, should help in the case be required. He discovered, in the briefest time, that no great damage had been done, and that no one had been injured.

Eager to be hastening onward, he turned back to his car. Almost immediately he saw that the chauffeur's seat was empty. Dorothy had apparently stepped once more inside, to be screened from public view.

Hastily scanning the crowd about the place, Garrison failed to find his driver. He searched about impatiently, but in vain. He presently became aware of the fact that his man had, for some reason, fled and left his car.

Considerably annoyed, and aware that he should have to drive the machine himself, he returned once more to the open door of the auto, intent upon informing Dorothy of their loss.

He gazed inside the car in utter bewilderment.

Dorothy also was gone.

CHAPTER XX

NEW HAPPENINGS

Still puzzled, unable to believe his senses, Garrison made a second quick search of the vicinity that was rapidly being cleared and restored to order by a couple of efficient police officers, but without avail.

Neither Dorothy nor the chauffeur could be found.

One of the officers ordered him to move along with his car. There was nothing else to be done. Reluctantly, and not without feelings of annoyance and worry, combined with those of baffled mystery and chagrin, Garrison was presently obliged to climb to the driver's seat and take the wheel in hand.

The motor was running, slowly, to a rhythmic beat. He speeded it up, threw off the brake, put the gears in the "low," and slipped in the clutch. Over the bridge in the halted procession of traffic he steered his course--a man bereft of his comrade and his driver and with a motor-car thrust upon his charge.