"Well, I thought Miss Greta needed _some_body."
"But didn't you want the somebody to be _you_?"
He looked at her again. "I suppose you're expecting to have Miss Greta back after the war."
"No," she said again, looking straight in front of her.
The thought of the solicitude of her parents to keep the dear child in the dark, suddenly flashed over him, along with the conviction, Madge knows!
Was it possible she accepted Greta's guilt? He couldn't make it out at all. "Weren't you sorry to see her go?"
"It was horrid," she admitted. After a few seconds she found a steadier voice in which to say, "It's been pretty horrid anyway, you know. We could prevent people from saying things, but we couldn't prevent them from looking things. They _wanted_ her to be a disgusting spy. They hated her worse for not being."
"Why don't you want her back when the war is over?"
She drew her red eyebrows together in a frown. "I expect," she said slowly, "it will be best for Germans to stay at home."
Napier laughed, but he felt sorry, in a way, to see Wildfire growing so sage. Evidently she had gone through a great deal in these weeks, a great deal of which she had given no sign. Behind her homesickness for her idol, Napier detected a great relief at the idol's being out of the way of suspicion and misprizing.
"That was why I wanted so to go and see her off. To try to make up a little; to do everything we _could_ do just because I felt there'd never be any other chance." The tears came at last. "She _was_ nice, wasn't she, Mr. Gavan?"
"She was wonderful." And before they fell back into that silence that lasted till they reached Lamborough, he asked, "How long have you known, Meggy?"
"Been sure only since yesterday--those men, what they did to her room."
There was good stuff in the McIntyre child, he said to himself. The part she'd played wouldn't have shamed Napier or even a Nicholson Grant.
There was nobody about to receive them on their return. When Madge had gone up to her mother, Napier took his way down the hall to Sir William's room. But he caught sight of him through the open door of the drawing-room at the far end. Sir William sat reading. That was natural enough, and he was sitting in his own chair. But as far away as Napier could see his chief, he was vaguely aware of something odd about the figure that was, or should be, so intimately familiar. It wasn't merely that Sir William did not instantly rise to his feet, seal-jingling, and call out, "Evening paper? Anything new about--" The first impression was of a man smaller than Napier had realized Sir William to be. Or had he--Napier half smiled at the grotesque idea--had he shrunken in these last hours? The great chair Miss Greta had fetched for him from Kirklamont certainly did seem ludicrously too big for a being so diminished, not only in body, but in spirit. His quick turns and vivid ways--what, Napier wondered with a dreamlike feeling as he walked down the room, had happened to all the familiar, foolish, endearing oddities? For an instant the thought thrust shrewdly, Is he dead? No, he moved.