while the captain reads his letters. . . . Have another liqueur? . . . . "
She then observed that Tietjens just bent open the top of the letters from Mrs. Wannop and then opened that from his brother Mark:
"Curse it," she said, "I've given him what he wants! . . . He knows. . . . He's seen the address . . . that they're still in Bedford Park. . . . He can think of the Wannop girl as there. . . . He has not been able to know, till now, where she is. . . . He'll be imagining himself in bed with her there. . . . "
Father Consett, his broad, unmodelled dark face full of intelligence and with the blissful unction of the saint and martyr, was leaning over Tietjens' shoulder. . . . He must be breathing down Christopher's back as, her mother said, he always did when she held a hand at auction and he could not play because it was between midnight and his celebrating the holy mass. . . .
She said:
"No, I am not going mad. . . . This is an effect of fatigue on the optic nerves. . . . Christopher has explained that to me . . . He says that when his eyes have been very tired with making one of his senior wrangler's calculations he has often seen a woman in an eighteenth-century dress looking into a drawer in his bureau. . . . Thank God, I've had Christopher to explain things to me. . . . I'll never let him go. . . . Never, never, let him go. . . . "
It was not, however, until several hours later that the significance of the father's apparition came to her and those intervening hours were extraordinarily occupied—with emotions, and even with action. To begin with, before he had read the fewest possible words
