“Ah! Geoffrey,” laughed Sylvia, “it all seems so simple to you, no doubt, but to me it is wonderful. I am glad to hear the British were not so behind as so many would have us believe. You are such a modest old thing--I feel sure you had something to do with the development of this invention. Come, tell me now.”
“Oh! really nothing at all, Sylvia,” he replied, “except perhaps to design an amplifier which was used with the first leader cable at--well, one of our naval bases.”
“I thought so,” said the girl whom he loved so dearly.
“But how about the long-distance telephone?” asked May Farncombe.
“What do you know about such a telephone?” Geoffrey asked in surprise, as the girl had referred to a technical point which only a man versed in wireless could understand.
For a few seconds the girl seemed rather confused. Then she said in a rather faltering voice, as she took up her wine-glass: “Oh! I don’t know anything about wireless, you know. Somebody told me of some wonderful results in telephoning over long distances.”
Those words caused Geoffrey Falconer to ponder.
He dropped the subject. Loyal as he was to the great Marconi Company, he refused to discuss any of its confidences over a dinner-table. And he was relieved when the general chatter became concerned with a dance which was to be given at Peterborough on the following evening.
Next morning, about eleven o’clock, Sylvia and Geoffrey went out for a walk together on the high road which leads into the quiet little town of Oundle. Sylvia in a thick grey coat and a canary-coloured scarf, and carrying a stiff ash stick, went along with true golfing stride.
Strangely enough, she was the first to mention the girl Farncombe.
“I can’t fathom May at all,” she said. “To me she’s a mystery.”
“Why?” asked her lover, pretending ignorance.
“I don’t know, but she knows so little of you--and yet she knows so much!”
“Well--her knowledge of wireless last night was extraordinary. She seems to know things that are entirely confidential. How? I don’t like such people, Geoff. They’re a bit uncanny!”
“Yes,” he laughed. “She’s somewhat of a mystery. But when one goes to a house-party one is sure to meet people who are mysterious. Yet they may be, after all, the most ordinary persons. It is one’s own point of view that often creates mystery. That’s my opinion.”