Geoffrey got up from where he was lying and walked silently with bare feet up and down the room. Then he stripped off coat and nightshirt, and sluiced head and neck with cold water. He felt awake enough, but stupid from sheer perplexity, and he was determined to give his faculties, such as they were, every opportunity for lively and wise decision. There had been, for instance, some train of instinctive thought in his mind when he had shut the door, but dressed himself for possible action. His brain had told him that he did not mean to go to bed yet; had it not told him something more? His action in putting on dark coverings had been perhaps involuntary; it was his business now to account for it.
Ah! the door by which Mr. Francis had entered--that was it. He did not believe that he had come in, as he said, by the front door, for the noise of its opening and shutting--the noise, too, of the lock which he said he had turned after he had come in--must have awoke him from a sleep that had never quite become unconsciousness. A clock had struck, it is true, the moment before he was completely roused, and he had not heard it; but how often, he reflected, do one's ears hear the clock strike, yet never convey the message to the brain! It was far more likely that the slight stir of movement made by Mr. Francis as he peeped round the inner door leading to the staircase had awoke him. How, then, was it possible that he should have opened, shut, and locked the heavy front door, have crossed the hall, and yet never have broken in upon his doze? Besides, the face that looked at him was that of a man peeping into a room, not of one leaving it. It seemed then very likely that Mr. Francis had not entered by the front door; it was also hardly possible that it should not have been locked at nightfall by the servant who put up the shutters.
Then another difficulty occurred. Since Mr. Francis had by his own account locked the front door when he came in, it would be locked now. But he intended to leave the house before the servants were up, and would unlock it then, leaving it unlocked when he left. On the other hand, supposing that Geoffrey's suspicions were correct, and he had not come in by the front door, nor intended to leave the house that way, he would certainly unlock it before any one was about in the morning. This, then, was the first point: Would Mr. Francis unlock the front door before morning, and would he leave the house that way? If not, how had he got in, and how would he get out? It was likely also, more than likely, that if Geoffrey's darker suspicions were well founded, Mr. Francis would pay a visit to the gun room, for there was no question that "the little circumstance" which he had hinted at had been of more than common interest to the other.