"Are they expecting--a crisis, then?"
"Yes--a sort of a one."
"When?"
Dolly seemed to consider.
"About five," she said.
"Hadn't I better be near, in case----?"
"Where are you to be this afternoon?"
"Hunnable."
Dolly nodded her head reflectively.
"When can you be back?" she asked.
"I can do it by five, I should think."
"That will be soon enough. The doctor said that if--you were wanted, it
would be about then. Good-bye, old gentleman!"
"Good-bye, Dolly! Mind you go to bed." (We seem to have spent a large
portion of that twenty-four hours urging each other to go to bed.)
Then I went back to work.
Polling had been brisk during the dinner-hour, and both Cash and Robin
considered that we were doing fairly well. Things would be slack at
Stoneleigh itself during the afternoon, and the obvious and politic
course now was to drive over to the fishing village of Hunnable--I had
only time for one, and this was the most considerable--and catch my
marine constituents as they emerged from the ocean, Proteus-like,
between three and four o'clock.
I did so, and for the space of an hour and a half I solicited the
patronage of innumerable tarry mariners, until their horny hands
had filled up the voting-papers and my own smelt to heaven of fish.
It was a quarter to five, and dark, before I escaped from the attentions
of a small but pertinacious group of inquirers who wanted to understand
my exact attitude on the question of trawling within the three-mile
limit, and proceeded at a hand-gallop back to Stoneleigh. (That
odoriferous but popular vehicle, the motor-car, was still in the
preceded-by-a-man-ten-yards-in-front-bearing-a-red-flag stage in those
days, and we had to rely on that antiquated but much more reliable
medium of transport, the horse.) The snow lay very heavily in places,
and our progress was not over-rapid. Moreover, passing the central
Committee Rooms on my way to the hotel, I was stopped and haled within
to conciliate various wobblers, and another twenty minutes of precious
time sped. But I stuck to my determination to let nothing interfere with
duty that day, and I argued with free-thinkers and pump-handled bemused
supporters until all was settled and Cash said I might go.
Still, it was nearer six than five when my panting horses drew up at the
Cathedral Arms.
There was no Dolly to receive me this time, but at the top of the stairs
leading to our rooms I met the doctor. He was accompanied by a
grey-haired, kind-eyed old gentleman in a frock-coat, with "London
Specialist" written all over him. It was Sir James Fordyce.
"Well?" I asked feverishly as I shook hands.
The two men motioned me into the sitting-room, and Farquharson said, in
a curiously uncertain fashion--
"Mr Inglethwaite, we have done a thing which should not, properly, have
been done without your consent. Your secretary suggested the idea, and I
agreed. Mrs Inglethwaite made a point of our saying nothing to you, and
volunteered to take all responsibility on herself. She said you were not
to be worried. So I wired for Sir James----"
"I see," I said, "and he operated?"
"Yes, at three o'clock this afternoon. Indeed, your sister-in-law, I
think, purposely concealed from you----"
"She did." That, then, was the "crisis" that Dolly had in her mind, and
that, too, was why she had told me to come back at five--when everything
would be well over!