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Hilary stopped reading. Geoff – poor Geoff! It was so absolutely damning. What could you do with evidence like that? What could any jury do? They were only out of the room ten minutes, and not for one moment of those ten minutes could anyone have doubted what their verdict would be – Wilful murder against Geoffrey Grey.
Hilary closed the file. She hadn’t the heart to read any more. The trial was only the same thing over again – the evidence more strictly controlled, but the same evidence; the speeches longer; the facts equally damning. She had read it all at the time. The jury had been out half an hour instead of ten minutes. They brought in the same verdict:
Wilful murder against Geoffrey Grey.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The sitting-room clock struck three. Hilary was asleep, her head tilted against the back of the chair, the file still heavy across her knees. The light stared down at her and took all the colour out of her face. The birds and flowers of Marion ’s chintz were bright, but Hilary was pale and very deeply asleep. The light shone on her closed eyelids without reaching her. One moment she was there, full of trouble for Geoffrey and for Marion, and then quite suddenly one of those doors in the long, smooth wall of her city of sleep had opened and let her through.
She came into a queer place. It was a very queer place indeed, a long dark passage ru
The light shone on her closed eyelids, and the tears of her dream welled up and ran down over her pale cheeks tear by tear. They wetted the bright pattern of the chintz, soaking into the blue bird-feathers and the rose-coloured paeony-petals. One of the tears wandered into the deep crinkle at the corner of her mouth. The salt taste of it came through into the dream.
In the next room Marion Grey lay in the dark and slept. She did not dream at all. All day long she turned a courageous mask upon the world. She had her living to earn. She earned it as a ma
Geoffrey Grey slept, too. He lay on his narrow bed, as his mother had seen him lie when he was a baby, as he had lain on his almost equally hard school bed, as Marion had watched him lie in the moonlight, in the breaking dawn, one arm thrown over his head and the hand of the other under his cheek. He was asleep and dreaming with a furious zest of all those things from which he was shut away. His body was in prison, but his mind went free. He was ru
Captain Henry Cu
Hilary was, of course, the disturbing factor. Hilary had been immensely keen about their ru
Suppose she had got really entangled with that swine Basil Montague. Suppose – suppose – suppose he had lost her…
It was at these moments, that sleep receded and porcelain lost its power to fix the mind. Henry sat miserably on the edge of his bed and wondered, undutifully and not for the first time, why his father had married his mother, and why his mother disliked Hilary so much. She hadn’t stopped abusing her the whole afternoon, and it was the last afternoon which Henry meant to spend at Norwood for a good long time. Thank heaven and his queer old godfather for the four-roomed flat over the antique shop which provided such a good excuse for not spending his leave with his mother. He had pla
There he was, back at Hilary again. His rage turned against himself because he was letting a chance glimpse of her unbalance him. When you have mapped out a path you should be prepared to follow it, and he was letting an accidental glimpse of Hilary tempt him to leave the mapped-out path and go plunging across country with the one idea of reaching her as soon as possible, snatching her up and kissing her, carrying her away and marrying her out of hand. He had actually fallen so low as to write to her – not the sort of calm forgiving letter of the plan but an incoherent appeal to make it up, to love him again, to marry him quickly. Even superior young men have their moments of weakness. It is true that he had surmounted his. The ashes of that undignified appeal were choking the grate at this moment, the light draught from the chimney stirred them lightly. So perish all traitor thoughts.