rose to her feet. She took half a dozen steps towards another table, then swung round and stood looking at them with eyes strained and lips half parted.
"We may be out of the woods; I hope so. Nothing unpleasant has happened since last Friday. Unless it happens tonight or tomorrow night, on Sunday we shall be off home with no more to worry about. But I do wish I could have made my story more convincing! I'm not silly and I'm not hysterical—not, at least, about things like that. Doesn't anybody believe me?"
"I believe you, Camilla," said Alan.
"Oh, dear God! If you start again, Alan Grantham-—!"
Alan got up and went over to look down at her.
"Women, Camilla," he said, "don't seem to be half as perceptive as they have a reputation for being. Should it occur to you that I am sneering or being facetious or speaking anything except the literal, painful truth, you can't see what's there to see and has been there for some time. I believe you because you're you; it couldn't be any other way. Whatever you say, I am solidly on your side."
Briefly she looked him full in the eyes.
"And if I could believe that—I"
"Camilla . . ."
"I also," boomed another voice, "may be enlisted solidly on Miss Brace's side."
All of them jumped; Alan retreated.
Dr. Gideon Fell, who had almost walked straight into the doorpost on entering the coffee-shop, altered his direction in time. Hat in one hand and stick in the other, he loomed majestically with eyeglasses again lopsided and big mop of hair over one ear.
"The word 'solid,'" pursued Dr. Fell, surveying the slopes of himself, "is perhaps superfluous. And I stray from the point. Teenage girls in America, we are told, will freeze to the telephone for hours at a time. They can go on at no greater length, I fear, than Henry Maynard of Maynard Hall, even when he ends by communicating very little. Might I trouble you, Alan, to drive this old carcass to James Island? He would like to see us as soon as may be convenient. And if he failed to credit Miss Brace's story of a week ago, he may now be persuaded to change his mind."
"Change his mind? Why?"
"It would seem," said Dr. Fell, "that something else has happened."
4
"This way, please," requested Henry Maynard.
The time, Alan afterwards remembered, was almost half-past three. And the weather seemed to be changing a little.
Captain Ashcroft had not accompanied them; he had other business, he explained, which wouldn't wait. With Camilla beside him, with Dr. Fell again in the back, Alan drove by way of Calh oun Street and the Ashley River Bridge. James Island, though largely residential, bustled with traffic at the beginning of Folly Road. Once you had made a left-hand turn off the main thoroughfare, and driven for five minutes through the countryside, its whole aspect changed.
How long had it been since anybody grew cotton here? At either side of them, great trees bearded with Spanish moss reared a canopy through which stipplings of sunlight danced on the road. They might have been miles from any human habitation, shut away as though by walls.
"I say, my dear fellow!" wheezed Dr. Fell. "Have you visited Maynard Hall before?"
"I've driven past the grounds, that's all. I've never been inside them."
"How much farther now?"
It was Camilla who answered.
"Fifteen minutes or so," she said, craning round. "There's another left turn at a little crossroads store; then straight on along Fort Johnson Road. We pass real-estate developments with some good-looking new houses, most of them not finished yet. We pass a high school. Just before the road ends in the fence around the research station, Maynard Hall is down on the left and sideways to the beach. Dr. Fell!"
"Oh, ah?"
"Since questions seem in order again, what did Mr. Maynard tell you? What's happened there since this morning?"
"My dear young lady, you are acquainted with your host"
"Am I? Sometimes I wonder!"
"Let me repeat," said Dr. Fell, "that he communicated very little. The man has