"
For an instant she was silent again, and then she suddenly said,
"I'm sure that writing was forged!"
It seemed to me that I read in her exclamation a kind of whipping up of
her unbelief, as though she needed to reassure herself.
"A pair of gloves on it?" I suggested.
I quite confess that it was not one of my most tactful suggestions. She
froze up again at once. Not that there was anything unkind in her eye as
we said good-bye, only it was clear that in the meantime we were each
going our own way.
I set out at my best pace back for I was hot for instant action, and
Jean's doubts, though I dismissed them as quite unjustified by anything
in the writing, nevertheless made me anxious to settle the question at
once. The end might be very near indeed, I told myself, as I strode out
with the last remains of my limp quite vanished. But what prompted those
doubts; a genuine disbelief in the authenticity of the handwriting, or a
perception of the logical consequences and a very natural shrinking from
them? I wondered very much. The fact that she had refrained from asking
a single question as to what I meant to do, suggested the second
solution. And yet it was curiously unlike Jean Rendall's fearless spirit.
XV
PART OF THE TRUTH
I never remember feeling more intensely chagrined than when I reached our
bleak house twenty minutes late for our early dinner to find the doctor
had eaten a hurried meal quarter of an hour before the usual hour and
rushed out to attend an urgent case.
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