Lord James spoke his secret thought for
him, and yet it startled him like an irrelevance.
"Where is the Prime Minister?" Herries had cried, suddenly, and
somehow like the bark of a dog at some discovery.
Doctor Prince turned on him his goggles and his grim face; and it
was grimmer than ever.
"I cannot find him anywhere," he said. "I looked for him at once,
as soon as I found the papers were gone. That servant of yours,
Campbell, made a most efficient search, but there are no traces."
There was a long silence, at the end of which Herries uttered
another cry, but upon an entirely new note.
"Well, you needn't look for him any longer," he said, "for here he
comes, along with your friend Fisher. They look as if they'd been
for a little walking tour."
The two figures approaching up the path were indeed those of Fisher,
splashed with the mire of travel and carrying a scratch like that of
a bramble across one side of his bald forehead, and of the great and
gray-haired statesman who looked like a baby and was interested in
Eastern swords and swordmanship. But beyond this bodily recognition,
March could make neither head nor tail of their presence or
demeanor, which seemed to give a final touch of nonsense to the
whole nightmare. The more closely he watched them, as they stood
listening to the revelations of the detective, the more puzzled he
was by their attitude--Fisher seemed grieved by the death of his
uncle, but hardly shocked at it; the older man seemed almost openly
thinking about something else, and neither had anything to suggest
about a further pursuit of the fugitive spy and murderer, in spite
of the prodigious importance of the documents he had stolen.
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