Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

CHAPTER III

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I HOPE,” said Professor Penrose, casting a lightning glance at his watch, which showed twenty minutes past twelve, and lifting the tone-arm delicately from his precious disc of Moravian Slovak recordings, “that we’ve at least established a basis for the name of our subject. I hope we can agree that it should not be merely ‘folk,’ but ‘music,’ too. Beware of the fanatic who finds everything phoney that isn’t sung without accompaniment by an eighty-five-year-old in a public bar… without voice, too, as a rule, and who can wonder at it? No, we’ve disposed of that. We’ve surely demonstrated that there are places in the world where performances of the utmost virtuosity can be truly ‘folk,’ because the heritage of that particular people is a musical sensitivity which we, here in England, associate only with privilege, training and sophistication. Never lose sight of that humbling fact, and beware of subscribing to purely English standards – or should I say, British?” He cocked an eye at Andrew Callum, and grinned. “But they’re two different things, as I’ll show you this evening. The Celtic fringe has the drop on us poor English in so many ways, you’ll find. Puritanism has a lot to answer for.” He slammed shut the huge book of notes at which he never even looked, though he opened it religiously at the beginning of each session.

“Now be off with you and get ready for lunch. This afternoon is free, and I understand the deputy warden has arranged two excursions for us in the locality. I’ll be going with one of the parties myself, so one of the coach-loads, at least, will have to behave. And the rest of you I’ll expect here at five, fit and ready for action. Mind you’re not late. Away with you, and wash! Gong in five minutes!”

They took their tone from him, and rushed for the doors in a furious babble of argument and controversy. It was becoming clear now that the professor, from the recesses of his own antiquity, regarded them all as eighteen years old at most, and liked them that way. They’d had a deliriously happy morning with him; the afternoon was to be in every sense a holiday, and the evening a continued delight. He had his class exactly where he wanted it.

The first coach, headed for Mottisham Abbey and the antiquities of West Midshire, and captained by the professor, hummed away down the drive prompt at two o’clock. Tossa and Dominic watched it go from the highest view-turret at the front of the house, up among the fantasy of chimneys and gargoyles and leads that lived a film-cartoon life of its own over the heads of the music-students. A scarlet beetle, scurrying along a thread of pale gravel, it rounded the planned bend in the drive, and vanished from sight. In a few minutes more the second, bound for the region of geological curiosities in the north-east of the county, followed it, Henry Marshall no doubt still anxiously counting his chickens. When it was gone, it seemed to them that the whole house had been evacuated, and they were alone with the fairy-tale threat that had driven the others away. Only then did they become aware of the large bird-population of Follymead, the inhabitants of this roof-world. The noise of starlings and martins and pigeons was all the music left to them. Somewhere in the park a green woodpecker was beating out his staccato rhythms like a drummer.

“You’re sure you didn’t want to go with them?” asked Dominic, shoulder to shoulder with Tossa at the open window.

She shook her head vehemently. “No, this is better. You know all those places, and we hardly know this at all. It’s all ours now.”

“Oh, there must be a few others who chose to stay.”

They saw one of them at that moment, crossing the pale forecourt far below them, a tiny, foreshortened human creature, walking rapidly but progressing slowly. It was astonishing how long it took him to cross the open court and set foot on the grass path that led away into the park, downhill towards the river, glimpsed in a few specks of silver through the trees.

“Lucifer was in no mood for excursions, evidently,” said Dominic.

The small, dark speck achieved form and proportion as it receded; it no longer looked as if it could be smudged out of existence, like a May midge, by the pressure of a finger. And in a moment a second figure came bounding down the steps to the gravel, and set off full speed in pursuit, a thin little figure with a child’s long-legged and angular movements. She caught him up before he reached the trees. He checked and turned for a moment with a formidable suggestion of impatience, but then he set off again, and she fell into step beside him. They disappeared together where the trees engulfed the path.

“I shouldn’t!” said Tossa in a warning whisper, and shook her head over what she certainly couldn’t help.

“Maybe you would, if you were Felicity. Actually he’s been remarkably forbearing with her so far, considering his reputation. She was under his feet all last night, and he stood it nobly.”

“It won’t last. She’ll be due for a shock pretty soon if she doesn’t get out of his hair.” Tossa looked after them with perplexed sympathy. “She’s a queer little thing, isn’t she? Rather sad, really. I was talking to that nice elderly maid in the buttery this morning. She says Felicity’s mother is Mr. Arundale’s younger sister, she’s a widow, not all that badly off, but the querulous sort, and it seems she’s inclined to think her distinguished brother owes her a living. She farms the girl out on Follymead every holiday as a sort of junior secretary, and has her hang around the Arundales all the time she isn’t at school.”

“Hoping she’ll come in for whatever they’ve got to leave, some day?”

“Well, that’s what Mrs. Bremmer says, anyway. After all, they’ve got no children of their own, so it’s a reasonable hope. And in the meantime, at least she’s making them provide for her nearly half the year. But what a life! I mean, it isn’t as if she was dumb. She isn’t at all, she’s rather too bright, if anything, she must know very well what goes on. Not too good for an intelligent adolescent,” said Tossa, wise at nineteen, “knowing she’s being used to prise hand-outs out of her relatives, and her mother cares more for her prospects than her company. No wonder she’s gone cagey. You can see right away that she’s all the time waiting for the world to hit out at her. That’s why she puts on the sophistication so thick, to pretend things don’t hurt.”

Dominic listened to this with the more respect because not so long ago Tossa herself had been in a somewhat similar relationship with the world at large, and her actress-mother’s procession of husbands in particular; and with the more tenderness and pleasure because her tone now indicated a quite remarkable degree of recovery. He was a little dubious of crediting himself with the change, but the fact remained that he had happened to Tossa just at the right time to assist the process. If she was right, then young Felicity Cope was all set to be a pushover for a grand passion; and if it went right it would liberate her for good, even if it afterwards went the way of most adolescent loves. But he couldn’t persuade himself that she was going to get anything but disaster out of Lucifer.

“Felicity!” he said thoughtfully, and made a wry face. “Whoever christened her that has something to answer for.”

Tossa leaned out from the window to look down dizzily on to the terraces below. “Look, there’s Liri, too.”

“So she didn’t want to go sight-seeing, either.”

Liri, in a red sweater bright as a drop of blood, crossed the terrace and walked slowly down the steps. On the drive she hesitated for a moment, and then set out briskly across the grass towards the distant hillock on which the fake ruin stood. She walked as one who has decided on an objective, rather than as one who is going somewhere with a purpose, and her chosen course was taking her steadily farther and farther away from the copse that had swallowed Lucien and Felicity. The damp grass showed the silvery line of her passing, lengthening along the sward; and it might also have been ruled there, it was so uncompromisingly straight.

“Let’s go down and have a look at the grounds,” said Tossa, turning away abruptly from the contemplation of that lance-like wake, “while we’ve got the place more or less to ourselves.”

They went down, and the house was wonderfully hushed and quiet about them. True, there were still one or two people around. The staff must be still washing up after lunch, Edward Arundale in his private quarters was collecting what he needed for his drive to Birmingham, there were two elderly ladies placidly reading in the gallery, and two more strolling between the flower-beds in the shelter of the enclosed garden; but with the withdrawal of some seventy people the whole house was changed, had reverted to its cat-sleep with eyes half-open, and lay deceptively still and harmless and helpless in the faint, stormy sunshine of April.

There was room in the grounds of Follymead to lose a thousand people, and still believe yourself alone. They walked away from the drive, turning towards the arched bridge that spanned the river in the distance. Crimson and orange alders showed the winding course of the stream, even when the flood-water itself was hidden from them. Clustering woods drew in to complete the picture like a blackcloth; and out of the trees, while they were still some hundred yards distant, came Felicity, her head down, her fleet, child’s running muted to a stumbling, rapid walk. She didn’t notice them until the sound of their feet whispering in the grass, and the hint of a shadow at the edge of her vision, made her fling up her head with a wild, wary gesture, like a startled colt.

She said: “Oh!… Hullo!” and her face put on its armour, settled narrow, clean-arched brows and quivering, irresolute mouth into arduous but instant serenity. “Going for a walk?”

“Why don’t you come with us?” suggested Tossa impulsively, and her eyes signalled apology to Dominic for a rash generosity he might not approve. But the girl was so solitary and gauche, and her grey eyes looked out so defensively from behind the delicate, half-formed face, like lonely wild things in hiding. “You know all the best places. We haven’t seen anything yet.”

“I’d love to, thank you… but I can’t. I’ve got to go in now. I’ve got some jobs to do for my uncle in the office. I only came out to run down and have a look at the swans’ nest. There’s a pair nesting down there under the alders, on a tiny island.” She pointed rather jerkily, turning her face away from them. “But be careful if you go to look, don’t go too near, will you? The pen’s all right, but if the cob’s there he can be rather dangerous.”

“We saw you come out,” said Dominic casually, and saw the faint colour flow and ebb again in her solemn face, and the grey eyes in ambush flare into panic for an instant. “We hoped you were going to have an afternoon off, you spend enough time indoors. Can’t the work wait for today?”

But she did not want it to wait, that was clear. She began to sidle round them, intent on escape. “No, I’d rather get it done. Things like the press-cutting book and the photographs get into arrears very easily, you see, and we don’t just keep them for interest, the record’s needed for reference. But, look, if you go on this way, along the river, you’ll come to the summer pavilion, and from there you can work round through the woods to the pagoda. There used to be a heronry there at the pool, but the last pair flew away last year. You will excuse me, won’t you?” She was backing away from them towards the house, ten yards distant before she stopped talking, and turned, and broke into a run. The feverish sound of her voice clung unpleasantly in their ears as she dwindled, sometimes running, sometimes walking hastily and unsteadily, her track a shaky line in the wet grass.

“It seemed only fair to let her know we’d seen her,” said Dominic dubiously, meeting Tossa’s eyes. “She hadn’t said anything that couldn’t be true, up to then.”

“I know, I was glad you said it. I don’t think we’ll go and look for the swan’s nest, somehow, do you? It’ll be there, of course. She’s quick, she wouldn’t give herself an excuse that could be knocked down just by going and looking.” Tossa stooped and picked up from the grass a couple of tiny, cross-shaped blossoms that had fallen from Felicity’s hair as she combed it nervously with her fingers. “Lilac… look, what a colour! So deep, and really almost pure blue instead of purple…”

She stood for a moment holding them, and then turned her palm and let them fall again sadly into the turf. “I suppose he turned on her. Something happened.”

“I suppose so,” said Dominic. “Probably told her to run away and play with her dolls.”

“Isn’t it hell,” sighed Tossa, “being fifteen?”

The coach parties came back hungry and in high spirits just after half past four, and tumbled up the steps into the hall for tea. The noise, now that they had sorted themselves out into congenial groups and had plenty to talk about, was deafening. Arundale, if he had been there to hear, would have been satisfied of the success of the course by the soaring decibel count. There were no clouds, no shadows, no disagreements, no clashes of temperament, and nobody even wondered why; until five o’clock struck, and Professor Penrose came in to hasten the laggards along to the drawing-room for his next lecture, and looking round the emptying room, suddenly asked. “Where’s young Galt?”

He was not with the other artists, already on station in the window-embrasure of the yellow drawing-room. He was not in the hall, lingering with the scones and tea-cups. And now that the question arose, he hadn’t been in to tea at all.

“He wouldn’t stand us up purposely, would he?” asked the professor shrewdly, and in a tone which required confirmation of his own views rather than information.

“Surely not,” said Dominic, abandoning his self-imposed task of loading the huge tea-trolley; and: “No!” said Liri Palmer at the same instant, and still more positively, even scornfully.

“No, that’s what I thought. Boy’s a professional. No, I don’t think he’d welch on a session. So where is he?”

There was a dead silence. No one had anything to volunteer. There were only a handful of them left there, in the strewn wreckage of tea, a china battlefield.

“He didn’t come out with us this afternoon,” said Henry Marshall. “Was he with your party?”

“No.” The professor sounded a little testy. Lucifer was not the kind of person who could pass unnoticed on board a coach.

“He stayed here,”‘ said Dominic. “Tossa and I saw him go out, soon after the coaches left. He started off towards the river, by that path that dives into the trees.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No. Felicity just might have. She was down that way this afternoon, we met her coming back.” No need to say she’d followed Lucien from the house; she knew there were others who knew, she’d be able to answer questions and keep her secrets, too.

“Shall I go and find Felicity?” offered Tossa, to fend off any other messenger.

“If you wouldn’t mind, my dear. No need to broadcast anything – not yet, anyhow.” The professor smiled at her, but he was not quite easy in his mind, even then.

“No, I won’t.” And in a few moments she returned from the drawing-room with Felicity. The girl was pale, her eyes huge and opaque as grey glass, her mask slightly and frighteningly out of drawing.

“Felicity, we’ve lost Lucien Galt.” The professor was placid and gentle. “Maybe he’s just loitering about somewhere with a stopped watch, maybe he’s gone to sleep in the summer-house, or something daft and simple. But we’d better have a look for him, perhaps, just in case. I hear you were down by the river this afternoon, did you see anything of him? I’m told he’d gone that way.”

“I… we went out together,” said Felicity in a thin thread of a voice. “He was just ahead of me when I went out, so I caught him up and we went together. We went downstream on the other side, but only as far as where the paths cross. You know, by the baby redwood tree. Then he went on across the loop, I think… anyhow, I crossed over again by the stone bridge, and left him there.” She looked from the professor to Dominic and Tossa, and moistened her lips. “I met Miss Barber and Mr. Felse when I was coming back.”

“And you weren’t out again? And you haven’t seen Mr. Galt come back to the house?”

She shook her head vehemently. “No. I was indoors all the rest of the afternoon. I had some work to do for Uncle Edward.”

The whip of the warden’s name stung Henry Marshall into full awareness of his responsibilities. Arundale was in Birmingham by now, and the whole load of Follymead came down on his deputy’s shrinking shoulders. The social load was enough, but that he was prepared to tackle. This was something that hadn’t been on the agenda, and he didn’t know what to do.

“He must be in the grounds,” he said unhappily. “Apparently he simply went out for a walk. I suppose there’s always a possibility that he may have had an accident, just an ordinary fall. It’s not so difficult to break an ankle, or something like that, along the river-banks. Professor, I really think you’d better get on with your lecture, and try to manage without him, if you can, while some of us have a hunt through the park for him.”

“I think I had,” agreed the professor dryly, one ear cocked for the rising noise of conversation drifting in from the distant drawing-room. “I’ll tell them nothing about this. Better keep it to the few of us here, until we know what we’re about.”

They agreed, in a subdued murmur.

“You find the lad,” said the professor, swooping towards the door. “I’ll keep this lot quiet.”

When he was gone, there were just five of them left in the room, Tossa, Felicity, Liri Palmer, Dominic and Marshall. It wasn’t the party they would have chosen. Three of them women, and two of those tense and anxious already. Liri was unquestionably durable, but Felicity looked brittle as glass, ready to shatter. Dominic touched her hand lightly, and urged her with a frown and a silent shake of his head to leave the search to them. Nevertheless, they were still five when they went out in the green, misty, pre-evening light to quarter the grounds for Lucien Galt.

The path by which Lucien and Felicity had vanished in the early afternoon sank itself deep in groves of diverse trees, artfully deployed, and reached the river at some distance from the house. A narrow footbridge with a single handrail brought Dominic to the other side. The largest of the three weirs that controlled the passage of the Braide through the Follymead grounds lay upstream, and here the waters rolled brown and high and fast, seamed with currents, and tossing twigs and branches from hand to hand as it rushed along. The spring rains had been heavy after heavy snows, the sodden grass of the banks fermented with brownish foam, and strained at its roots, streaming out like dead hair along the taut surface of the water. On the other side the path turned downstream, at first close to the bank; but in a little while it plunged into woodland again, and left the waterside to take a short cut across one of the artificial loops into which the Braide had been contorted by Cothercott ingenuity.

Dominic turned with the path. Almost certainly Lucien had come this way with Felicity this afternoon, just as she had said. She had reappeared from the copse on the other bank, having recrossed by the arched stone bridge two or three loops downstream, the bridge which was designed as a part of the Follymead stage-set, to be seen in exactly the right place in that elaborate landscape when viewed from the drawing-room windows. Somewhere between this spot and that bridge she and Lucien had parted company. Dominic walked the widening ride, fenced off now on the water side by a barrier of old, ornate iron posts and fine chains, and his feet were silent in last autumn’s rotting leaves.

It didn’t follow, of course, that Lucien need be anywhere in this quarter now; in the time between he could have been anywhere in the grounds, or even several miles out of them. There was so much of Follymead that the five of them had had to spread themselves out singly in order to cover it all; and it was hardly surprising that Felicity had set off, at first, in this direction. But she had drawn back when she had seen Dominic heading the same way, and gone off voluntarily to thread the shrubberies and gardens on the other side of the house. Liri and Tossa were patrolling the more open ornamental park-land, one on either side the drive to the lodge. Where Marshall was he didn’t know; probably in the distant preserves which were going to be the worst job of all if they were forced to make a real search of it.

The river was out of sight now, somewhere away on his right hand; but here came a small cleared space where another path crossed his, and the right turn here must surely close in on the Braide again, and bring him to the bridge. And here was Felicity’s baby redwood, just inside the railed enclosure, an infant of about fifty or sixty, probably, with the characteristic spreading base and narrow, primitive, aspiring shape. He leaned over the chain fence and stuck his thumb into the thick, spongy bark. So here it had happened, whatever had happened between them… here or somewhere close by, she wouldn’t bother to be accurate to a few yards. And after that nobody had seen anything of Lucien again. Though there was always the comfortable possibility, of course, that he had simply decided to be irresponsible this evening, and gone off to the pub in the village to see what entertainment was offering locally.

Dominic would have liked to believe it; but whatever Lucien Galt might not have been, he seemed to be a conscientious professional who delivered what he promised. And again, and more disturbingly, the prosaic solution didn’t chime with the atmosphere of this fantastic place.

He hesitated at the crossing of the two paths, and then turned right, as Felicity must have done when she took her broken heart and hurt pride in her arms and ran away from the debacle. And twenty yards along, with the chain fence still accompanying him on his right, he came to an enormous scrolled iron gate in it, massive with leaves and flowers, twice as tall as the fence. Evidently the gate was a survival from some older and far more solid fence, long taken down for scrap. To judge by the gate itself, it dated from the high days of iron, maybe around 1800 or even earlier, stuff that could go neglected for centuries before it even began to corrode seriously. It hadn’t been painted for a long time, and it sagged a little on its hinges, but swung freely when he pushed it. The bracket into which the latch should drop was still fixed immovably to the gate-post, as big as a bruiser’s closed fist; but there was no latch hanging now in the wards.

The elaboration of the approach suggested that this patch of woodland by the river bank enshrined one of the features of the grounds. He went through the gate on impulse, and down to the riverside. He could see the distant gleam of sullen light on the water in broken glimpses between the trees; and the belt of woods thinned suddenly and brought him out on an open stretch of grass, ringed round every way with shrubs. Even across the river the woods lay close here, the alders leaning over the bank. A nice, quiet, retired place, carefully made, like everything here. Nature had abdicated, unable to keep up the pace. The cluster of rocks that erupted on the bank had been placed there by man, artfully built up to look as natural as the eighteenth century liked its landscape features to look. Dominic crossed the thirty yards or so of open meadow that separated him from it, and found that the face the rocks turned towards the Braide was hollowed into a narrow cavern, with a stone bench fitted inside it. The inside walls were encrusted with stucco and shells, and overgrown with ferns, and there had once been a small spring there, filling a little channel in the stone floor and running down to the river. There was only a green stain there now, and a growth of viridian moss.

He looked round the grotto dubiously, and was turning to leave it when he saw, between the stone and the river, the first raw scars in the grass. The ground was soft and moist, the grass still short, but lush enough to show wounds. Feet had stamped and shifted here, with more pressure and greater agitation than in mere walking. Close to the edge of the flood, gathering in concentrated force here before leaping the third weir, there was a patch of grass some two yards across that had been trampled and scored, the dark soil showing through. Here someone’s foot had slipped and left a slimy smear.

Dominic approached cautiously, avoiding setting foot on the scarred place. Close to the water the grass shrank from a bare patch of gravel and stone; and there were two darker spots on the ground, oval and even and small, a dull brown in colour. He stooped to peer at them. It had rained briefly in the morning, but not since. These were therefore more recent than that rain; and they looked to him like drops of blood. He went down on one knee carefully to look more closely, and put his supporting hand on something hard that shifted in the grass. He made an instinctive movement to pick it up, and then took out his handkerchief, and handled his find delicately through the linen. A small silver medal, worn almost smooth, some human figure, maybe a saint, on one side, and on the other what seemed to be a lion rampant. From the ring that pierced it above the saint’s head a thin silver chain slid away like a snake and slipped through his fingers; he caught it in his other hand, and saw that it had not been unclasped, but broken.

He had seen it before, or at least something so like it that in his heart he knew it was the same; round, worn, plain, of this very size, why should there be two such in Follymead at the same time?

This morning, at Professor Penrose’s lecture, Lucien Galt had worn an open-necked sweater-shirt, and several times he had leaned forward to attend to the professor’s record player for him. He had then been wearing this medal round his neck. Dominic had noticed it because it had seemed at first out of character; and then, and more acutely, because it was entirely in character, after all, that he should wear it as he did, without a thought for either display or concealment, as naturally as he wore his eyelashes. And the thing itself had an austerity that made it singularly personal and valid, like a silver identity bracelet round a sailor’s wrist in wartime. Not for show, but not to be hidden, either; something with a right to be where it was.

He stared at it in the fading light, and he knew it was the same. He looked at the sky, which was ragged with broken clouds, and then went and found some large leaves of wild rhubarb from the waterside, and laid them over the drops that were possibly blood, and the trampled ground, in case of rain. He found a sharp stone and drove it into the turf where he had picked up the medal. That was all he could do.

Then he went to find Henry Marshall.

“I’m not sure about the blood,” said Dominic for the fourth time. “I am sure about the struggle. Two people – or more than two, but it looks like two – were fighting there. And this was in the grass, and Liri says it was his, and I say so, too. And that’s all we’ve got, between the five of us.”

They were in the warden’s office, with the door tightly shut. Dinner was over, without them; they had sandwiches and coffee in here, but no one had done more than play with them. Liri sat bolt upright, pale and calm, her mouth tight and her eyes sombre. Felicity, mercifully, had been manoeuvred out of the council by Tossa, and driven in to the evening session, where she would have to mingle and be social and keep her mouth shut. She didn’t even know exactly what Dominic had found, though maybe she guessed more than was comfortable. Someone would have to keep an eye on her, and it looked as if the someone would have to be Tossa. But Felicity had resources of her own, and whatever she couldn’t do yet, she could keep secrets. At fifteen it’s an essential quality; one’s life depends on it. She wouldn’t give anything away.

“We can’t leave it at that,” said Dominic reasonably.

“No, I realise that, of course.” Henry Marshall was barely thirty, none too sure of himself after four months under Edward Arundale’s formidable shadow, and at this moment in an agony of indecision. “But we have no proof at all that anything disastrous has happened, no proof of a crime, certainly. And you must understand that this establishment is in a curiously vulnerable position. If a scandal threatened our reputation it might cut off funds from several sources, as well as frightening away our actual student potential.” He dug his fingers agitatedly into his straw-coloured hair, and his black-rimmed spectacles slid down his long young nose. “A bad period of some weeks could close us down. It would be cataclysmic. As long as we run steadily on a moderate backing we’re perfectly safe. But any interruption of any long duration would finish us. And that would be a real national loss. I know we must follow this up. But I must protect Follymead, too. It’s what I’m here for.”

“I still think we need the police,” said Dominic. “For that very purpose. You want to avoid scandal, of course, but it would be a worse scandal if you concealed what turned out to be a criminal matter. To cover Follymead, I’m afraid you’ve got to hand this job over to the proper people.”

And that was the whole crux of the matter, the thing that was tearing the deputy warden apart. He was terrified of calling in the police, perhaps to find it had all been unnecessary, and even more terrified of bearing the responsibility for not calling them in, should the affair turn out to be serious after all. Above all he was afraid of trying to contact Edward Arundale, and for good reason. Arundale was a man of decision, who would know how to deal with every situation, and he would be highly intolerant of any deputy who couldn’t handle affairs himself in an emergency. Marshall hadn’t been here long, this was his first assignment on his own responsibility; and he wanted, how he wanted, to keep his job.

“We have so little to go on,” he said in agony.

“We’re not competent,” said Liri Palmer tersely, “to say whether it’s little or much. That’s the whole point.”

Dominic looked at Tossa, and found her looking at him, with the clear, trusting, eager look by means of which she communicated her sense of adoption into his family. He knew what she was thinking, and what she wanted him to do and say. It was having lost her own father so early, and suffered such frustrations and vicissitudes with stepfathers since, that had made her attach herself so fervently and gratefully to Dominic’s beautifully permanent, stable and reassuring parents. And especially to George Felse. He wasn’t at all like her adored professor father, but he gave her the same sense of security. She would have taken all her own problems to him, it was natural she should think of him immediately in this crisis. Even if he hadn’t been a policeman, she would have wanted him; but he was, and that was the solution to everything.

An exchange of glances like that, radiant with confidence, could turn Dominic’s bones to water with gratitude and astonishment. He had brought her home in the common agonies every man feels in bringing together two jealous and valued loves; he wasn’t yet used to the staggering bliss and relief of his total success.

“If I could make a suggestion,” he said, with all the more care and delicacy because of his own conviction of undeserved grace, “I could get my father to have a look over the ground.” He caught Tossa’s glowing glance, and trembled; he still couldn’t quite believe in the accumulation of his luck. “He’s a detective-inspector in the county C.I.D. I’m sure he’d be willing to come out here, if you’ll let me call him. Then you’d have covered yourself and the college, in case there is something in this. And we could ask him to treat it as a quite private matter until he’s satisfied that there’s a case for official investigation. In either case, you’d be protected.”

Henry Marshall took his head out of his hands, and gaped unbelievingly but gladly at his salvation. Arundale himself couldn’t do better than this.

“You think he’d come? On those terms?”

“I’m sure he would. It’s better for them, too, if they have notice of these things in time to judge. If it turns out to be something quite harmless and on the level, so much the better. May I call him?”

“Please do,” said Henry Marshall thankfully. “Perhaps you could meet him at the lodge, when he arrives? You do drive? Take the station wagon down and wait for him. I’ll talk to Professor Penrose, and see to everything here. We shall be most grateful. Most grateful!”