"I think you had better go!" Wilfrid said when he had returned to the dining-room. "Everybody has gone to bed and your patient will be safe in my hands. You ought not to be more than an hour away. The road is a good one and you can't go wrong."
A few minutes later and Mason was speeding off to Castlebridge on his bicycle. Wilfrid laid his book aside and pitched his cigarette into the grate. He must sit in the sick-room and watch till Mason returned. Flower lay quiet and still as death. He hardly seemed to breathe. There was a good fire in the room and the atmosphere inclined Wilfrid to drowsiness, and presently he shut his eyes.
He was aroused a little later by the sounds of muttering from the bed. Flower's eyes were closed and seemed to be dreaming about something in which the name of Cotter was mixed up.
"Why doesn't he come back?" he was saying. "What a time he is! He promised me to see the matter through this afternoon. I was a fool to trust him. I am a fool to trust anybody but myself, and some day he will desert me and I shall have to bear it all myself. But he doesn't know everything; nobody knows the secret that lies hidden in Maldon Grange."
The speaker broke off into a feeble chuckle. There was something sinister in this senile mirth, something that caused Wilfrid to turn away in disgust. The voice ceased a moment later and all was still.
Surely Mason was a long time. More than an hour had passed and there was no sign of the nurse's return. Wilfrid closed his eyes just for a moment, or so it seemed to him, and when he looked again he saw the clock was pointing to half-past two.
He jumped to his feet with a start. For nearly two hours he had utterly forgotten his duty to the patient! He turned to the bed to see if Flower required anything, then a startled cry came from his lips. The bed was empty!
Wilfrid gazed at the sheets and pillows with a feeling of stupefaction. At first he thought some one must have stolen into the bedroom and kidnapped his patient. But the idea was abandoned as absurd. Wilfrid knew himself to be a light sleeper, and it would have been impossible for two men or more to enter the bedroom and carry off a heavy man like Flower. Besides, he would have offered some sort of resistance. He must face the matter calmly and find out without delay what had become of the patient. Most of his clothes no longer hung over the chair by the bedside where they had been thrown and even the slippers were gone.