"Very well, Griselda," I muttered stonily. "I must think. I shall call you a little later. Don’t alarm the others."
She hated him, had said Griselda! There was a meager ray of comfort. But do what I would, my stunned mind continued to flutter heavily like a half-scorched moth around the ugly, sinister vision of Pendleton. Could he be at the bottom of Alicia’s disappearance? How had he contrived the trick? If only I had gone to the station with him! Was it that that accounted for his hurry to be gone? No! It was impossible. Ought I to start in pursuit at once? No, no, no! I could not believe it. It could not be—not of her own free will! Yet my heart was lacerated by the possibility. When I lifted my head from my bosom, I gasped in a desolation of emptiness.
I had stifled the prompting to call Dibdin last night, but now I felt I must find him. I needed the solace and advice of a friend. I rose heavily and put on my hat. Visconti had not yet come in.
"Tell Mr. Visconti," I said to Varesi, my young understudy, "that I have been called away suddenly, on a serious private matter. I shall telephone him later."
"Yes, Mr. Byrd," responded Varesi, his lustrous Italian eyes flashing sympathy. He thought, no doubt, from what he must have overheard, that some rascal had run off with my younger sister—a killing matter, very possibly, to a properly constituted male. Had he known the truth, his Latin mind would have been shocked at my seeming Anglo-Saxon composure. Out of doors I heaved a deep sigh and boarded a north-bound elevated train for the eighties, where Dibdin has his lodgings, near the Museum of Natural History.
I found Dibdin not at his lodging but at the Museum, directing the rearrangement of the Polynesian section in the light of his additions to it.
He turned one intense glance upon me without speaking, hurriedly gave some directions to the men at work, and led me to an alcove where there was a bench.
"Now, let’s hear—" he said. "What’s he been doing?" He concluded at once that Pendleton was at the bottom of whatever wild appearance I must have presented.
Briefly, but without omitting any essential detail, I gave him an account of all that had happened the previous evening, including Griselda’s announcement of the morning.
