Page:Oppenheim--The cinema murder.djvu/248

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238
THE CINEMA MURDER

"I will be with you in ten minutes," she promised.

He set the receiver down. Those ten minutes were surely the longest which had ever ticked their way into Eternity! And then she came. He heard the lift stop and his door open. There was a moment's breathless silence as their eyes met, then a little gathering together of the lines of her forehead, a half querulous, half sympathetic smile. She shook her head at him.

"You've had one of those silly nervous attacks," she declared. "Tell me at once why?"

"Dane is back—I saw him on the pavement this morning!" he exclaimed. "He has been to England to find out!"

She made him sit down and seated herself by his side.

"Listen," she said, "Dane came back on the Orinoco, the day before yesterday. I saw his name in the paper. If his voyage to England had been a success, which it could not have been, you would have heard from him before now."

"I didn't think of that," he muttered.

"I have never asked you," she went on, "to tell me exactly what happened behind there. I don't want to know. Only I have a consciousness—I had from the first, when you began to talk to me about it—that your fears were exaggerated. If you have been allowed to remain safe all this time, you will be safe always. I feel it, and I am always right in these things. Now use your own common sense. Tell me truthfully, don't you think it is very improbable that anything could be discovered?"