The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [4977]
"Do you think she has gone to France?" He knew his voice sounded stiff and constrained.
"I hope not. She was being so useful here. Of course, the draft law - amazing thing, the draft law! Never thought we'd come to it. But it threw her out, in a way, of course."
"What has the draft law to do with Mrs. Valentine?"
"Why, you know what she was doing, don't you?"
"I haven't seen her recently."
The rector half-stopped.
"Well!" he said. "Let me tell you, Clayton, that that girl has been recruiting men, night after night and day after day. She's done wonders. Standing in a wagon, mind you, in the slums, or anywhere; I heard her one night. By George, I went home and tore up a sermon I had been working on for days."
Why hadn't he known? Why hadn't he realized that that was exactly the sort of thing she would do? There was bitterness in his heart, too. He might easily have stood unseen in the crowd, and have watched and listened and been proud of her. Then, these last weeks, when he had been working, or dining out, or sitting dreary and bored in a theater, she had been out in the streets. Ah, she lived, did Audrey. Others worked and played, but she lived. Audrey! Audrey!
" - in the rain," the rector was saying. "But she didn't mind it. I remember her saying to the crowd, 'It's raining over here, and maybe it's raining on the fellows in the trenches. But I tell you, I'd rather be over there, up to my waist in mud and water, than scurrying for a doorway here.' They had started to run out of the shower, but at that they grinned and stopped. She was wonderful, Clayton."
In the rain! And after it was over she would go home, in some crowded bus or car, to her lonely rooms, while he rolled about the city in a limousine! It was cruel of her not to have told him, not to have allowed him at least to see that she was warm and dry.
"I've been very busy. I hadn't heard," he said, slowly. "Is it - was it generally known?"
Had Natalie known, and kept it from him?
"I think not. Delight saw her and spoke to her, I believe."
"And you have no idea where she is now."
"None whatever."
He learned that night that Natalie had known, and he surprised a little uneasiness in her face.
"I - heard about it," she said. "I can't imagine her making a speech. She's not a bit oratorical."
"We might have sent out one of the cars for her, if I'd known."
"Oh, she was looked after well enough."
"Looked after?"
Natalie had made an error, and knew it.
"I heard that a young clergyman was taking her round," she said, and changed the subject. But he knew that she was either lying or keeping something from him. In those days of tension he found her half-truths more irritating than her rather childish falsehoods. In spite of himself, however, the thought of the young clergyman rankled.
That night, stretched in the low chair in his dressing-room, under the reading light, he thought over things carefully. If he loved her as he thought he did, he ought to want her to be happy. Things between them were hopeless and wretched. If this clergyman, or Sloane, or any other man loved her, and he groaned as he thought how lovable she was, then why not want for her such happiness as she could find?
He slept badly that night, and for some reason Audrey wove herself into his dreams of the new plant. The roar of the machinery took on the soft huskiness of her voice, the deeper note he watched for and loved.
CHAPTER XLI
Anna Klein stood in her small room and covered her mouth with her hands, lest she shriek aloud. She knew quite well that the bomb in the suit-case would not suffice to blow up the whole great plant. But she knew what the result of its explosion would be.
The shells were not loaded at the Spencer plant. They were shipped away for that. But the fuses were loaded there, and in the small brick house at the end of the fuse building there were stored masses of explosive, enough to destroy a town. It was there, of course, that Herman