net could not help thinking that his father had been more concerned in old Jim's whereabouts than one would have expected. Recollections of his father's anxiety disturbed Bennet so that he shifted restlessly in his seat and applauded Galli-Curci automatically while staring past her with vacant eyes.
Abruptly he began matching up observations of his own with those which Ethel had related to him, and he remembered that his father had seemed to him decidedly on edge over nothing a few days earlier; by reckoning, he discovered it was the same day upon which Ethel had found their grandfather so upset and upon which his father—so Ethel said—had sent that telegram to St. Florentin. Sitting in the dimly lit auditorium while the singers were going through the violent scenes with Sparafucile, Bennet found it annoyingly easy to visualize his grandfather going about the lower floor of the big house at St. Florentin with a loaded rifle under his arm and waiting for Kincheloe who was returning with the dogs, one of which had blood frozen in his hair. Ethel had related to Bennet that their grandfather had said of this blood, "Lad caught a fox"; but Bennet knew that his grandfather had not been waiting in the house with a loaded gun to guard against the attack of a fox.
Bennet did not doubt the exact truth of incidents which Ethel stated that she actually saw; but he had no patience with what she "supposed"; and he considered her conclusions absolutely lunatic. Yet the difficulty of supplying himself with more satisfying conclusions from the same facts kept him disturbed; when he returned home at midnight and saw that the light was still burning in his father's room, he went to the door and knocked.
