R

"Go ahead, then," said Deede Dawson, and the great car with its terrible
burden shot away into the night.

For a moment or two Deede Dawson stood looking after it, and then
he turned and walked slowly towards the house, and mechanically Dunn
followed, the sole thought in his mind, the one idea of which he was
conscious, that of Ella driving away into the darkness with the dead
body of his murdered friend in the car behind her.

Did she--know? he asked himself. Or was she ignorant of what it was she
had with her?

It seemed to him that that question, hammering itself so awfully upon
his mind and clamouring for an answer, must soon send him mad.

And still before him floated perpetually a picture of long, dark, lonely
roads, of a rushing motor-car driven by a lovely girl, of the awful
thing hidden in the car behind her.

Dully he recognized that the opportunity for which he had watched and
waited so patiently had come and gone a dozen times, for Deede Dawson
had now quite relaxed his former wary care.

It was as though he supposed all danger over, as though in the reaction
after an enormous strain he could think of nothing but the immediate
relief. He hardly gave a single glance at Dunn, whose faintest movement
before had never escaped him. He had even put his pistol back in his
pocket, and at almost any moment Dunn, with his unusual strength and
agility, could have seized and mastered him.

But for such an enterprise Dunn had no longer any spirit, for all his
mind was taken up by that one picture so clear in his thoughts of Ella
in her great car driving the dead man through the night. "She must
know," he said to himself. "She must, or she would never have gone off
like that at that time--she can't know, it's impossible, or she would
never have dared."

And again it seemed to him that this doubt was driving him mad.

Deede Dawson entered the house and got a bottle of whisky and a syphon
of soda-water and mixed himself a drink. For the first time since Ella's
departure he seemed to remember Dunn's presence.

"Oh, there you are," he said.

Dunn did not answer. He stood moodily on the threshold, wondering why he
did not rush upon the other, and with his knee upon his chest, his
hands about his throat, force him to answer the question that was still
whispering, shouting, screaming itself into his ears:

"Does she know what it is she drives with her on that big car through
the black and lonely night?"

"