Anne Belinda by Patricia Wentworth Page A

abandon. He scribbled once more, and jerked his chair a little nearer.
    â€œSir John, I must persuade you! I have that very specimen at my house, not two miles away. You will come and see it! Of course, I have other specimens too—albinism has always enthralled me—er—yes, enthralled me. You will give me the pleasure of dining with me. My wife will be charmed to make your acquaintance. You may have heard of her. She was a prominent suffragist—she writes on social subjects. She is the Mrs. Fossick-Yates.”
    As John walked home, he wondered why on earth he had allowed himself to become entangled with the Fossick-Yates. They would give him an appallingly bad dinner, and he would have to look at all Fossick-Yates’ specimens and listen through hours of protracted boredom to Mrs. Fossick-Yates on social subjects. He groaned aloud at the prospect, and cursed his folly. If Frederick Fossick-Yates had been a shade less innocently delighted over his mention in chapter six and the footnote about his viper in chapter fifteen, he would have gone on saying no or having previous engagements till all was blue. As it was, the beaming eyes behind the crooked glasses had betrayed him into this ghastly engagement.
    He stopped thinking about Mr. Fossick-Yates, and let his thoughts go back to Anne Belinda. He began very methodically to sort out and file away all the different scraps of information which he had collected. He had not the very slightest intention of taking Mr. Carruthers’ advice and letting the matter drop. That he had been advised to let it drop was, in fact, one of his most urgent reasons for not dropping it; at every hint of opposition his determination hardened.
    It was years since anything except acute physical discomfort had kept John awake at night. As a rule, when his head touched the pillow, sleep came and remained, deep, peaceful, and dreamless until forcibly disturbed next morning. To-night he lay awake for a long time, trying to fit his scraps together. He held imaginary conversations with Mrs. Jones and with Mr. Carruthers—frightfully leery conversations, in which he extracted information from them which they were quite determined not to give up. The extraordinary ingenuity which he displayed was very encouraging to him; but a dreadful fear that it might evaporate in the daylight kept him from being unduly puffed up.
    He must have passed directly from one of these conversations into an uneasy sleep, for quite suddenly he not only heard Mrs. Jones speaking, but he could see her—only she wasn’t Mrs. Jones at all, but little Fossick-Yates in petticoats, with his beard, and his glasses all askew, and a wreath of primroses round his bald head. He said, speaking very earnestly, “If you really want to know, I’ll tell you—but it’s most frightfully confidential. The fact is, it’s a yellow streak—not a white one, you understand, but yellow, yellow all through.” When he said yellow the second time he began to throw primroses at John, and they turned into snakes as they touched the ground.
    In his dream John began to run like the wind. He ran all up one side of the Amazon, and all down the other. And then all at once quite suddenly he was running down the Valley of the Waveney by a little crystal stream that lost itself in moss. Suddenly he stopped running, because there was nothing to run away from any more. He stood quite still and looked across the stream; and from the other side of it Anne Belinda looked at him and smiled. She wore her old brown holland overall, and her hair fell in two long dark plaits. She smiled at him, and an intense, joyful expectancy stabbed deep, deep into his dream. He didn’t know in the least what he expected.
    He woke, and found himself sittting straight up in bed, which was very odd indeed. The whole thing was very odd. He lay down in the dark and puzzled over it. It was strange to feel in a dream what he had never