"That is all," he said, "except of course my message, which is verbal. My name is Stardt, you may have heard the doctor speak of me. We have had some correspondence."
"The message is for him alone, of course, as you will understand, and if I deliver it to you," smiled Herr Stardt, "you should not understand it, because it is one word."
"One word?" said Beale blankly. "A code--hang!"
Oliva Cresswell awoke to consciousness as she was being carried up the stairs of the house. She may have recovered sooner, for she retained a confused impression of being laid down amidst waving grasses and of hearing somebody grunt that she was heavier than he thought.
Also she remembered as dimly the presence of Dr. van Heerden standing over her, and he was wearing a long grey dust-coat.
As her captor kicked open the door of her room she scrambled out of his arms and leant against the bed-rail for support.
"I'm all right," she said breathlessly, "it was foolish to faint, but--but you frightened me."
The man grinned, and seemed about to speak, but a sharp voice from the landing called him, and he went out, slamming the door behind him. She crossed to the bath-room, bathed her face in cold water and felt better, though she was still a little giddy.
Then she sat down to review the situation, and in that review two figures came alternately into prominence--van Heerden and Beale.
She was an eminently sane girl. She had had the beginnings of what might have been an unusually fine education, had it not been interrupted by the death of her foster-mother. She had, too, the advantage which the finished young lady does not possess, of having grafted to the wisdom of the schools the sure understanding of men and things which personal contact with struggling humanity can alone give to us.
The great problems of life had been sprung upon her with all their hideous realism, and through all she had retained her poise and her clear vision. Many of the phenomena represented by man's attitude to woman she could understand, but that a man who admittedly did not love her and had no other apparent desire than to rid himself of the incubus of a wife as soon as he was wed, should wish to marry her was incomprehensible. That he had already published the banns of her marriage left her gasping at his audacity. Strange how her thoughts leapt all the events of the morning: the wild rush to escape, the struggle with the hideously masked man, and all that went before or followed, and went back to the night before.