Will O’ the Wisp by Patricia Wentworth Page B

Folly. “I like driving up. And, of course”—very sweetly—“I like going with you.”
    David surveyed her with disapproval. The scarlet hat and suit he had seen before, but the black patent leather shoes with scarlet heels were a new horror.
    â€œMy good girl, you can’t go up to town in those shoes!”
    â€œI don’t think I’m anybody’s good girl. Am I?”
    She did a dance step to display the shoes, kicked up the little red heels with a flourish, and announced that they were dinky.
    David turned away and picked up the paper. His conviction that Folly wanted slapping passed into a strong desire to administer some of the arrears which he considered were a good deal overdue.
    â€œOf course, if you don’t mind being followed in the street,” he observed coldly. He shook out the paper. “You will be, to a dead cert.”
    â€œI get followed anyhow,” said Folly in a little whispering voice.
    David was not at all surprised to hear it. What did surprise him was his own furious anger. If the door had not opened, he might have spoken. A moment later he was blessing Carter’s timely entrance with haddock and coffee.
    Folly pounced on the coffee-pot and began to pour out. David, erecting The Times between them, replied as shortly as possible to inquiries about milk, sugar, toast, butter, and marmalade.
    They had finished breakfast, and Folly was slipping into a dark fur coat, when David, folding the paper over, found his eye caught and held. He had just said to Folly: “I suppose you know I’m staying the night with Frank and Julie. You’ll have to come down by train.” But he did not hear her answer; he had not, in fact, the very slightest idea whether she answered or not. He stared at the Agony Column, and then, rising with a jerk, he walked across to the window and stood there with his back to the room, looking at his own initials.
    It was the third advertisement in the column; if it had been a little lower down, he might easily have missed it. “D. A. St. K. F.”—David Alderey St. Kern Fordyce. The letters seemed blacker than the surrounding print; the whole message seemed to detach itself and to float a little above the paper upon which it was printed:
    â€œD. A. St. K. F.—Your wife is alive.”

CHAPTER VIII
    David dropped Folly in Knightsbridge. She had sat by his side for thirty miles like the little image he had called her, and neither of them had said a word. Folly could see David’s face in the glass screen; its expression certainly did not invite conversation. She could see her own face too powdered and whitened as if yesterday had never been; the vermilion-red lips matched the hat that hid every vestige of hair.
    When the car drew up, she jumped nimbly out, fished out a suitcase which David did not remember to have seen before, nodded quite gravely, and was gone. He saw the twinkle of the scarlet heels, and he saw one or two people look at them. Then Miss Folly dived into a shop, and he forgot her and her suitcase for eight or nine hours.
    It was in the middle of the Aldereys’ dinner that Eleanor rang him up. Frank answered the telephone and spoke over his shoulder:
    â€œIt’s Eleanor—she wants you.”
    David got up, wondering if the house were on fire. He wondered still more when he realized that Eleanor was trying to steady her voice and not succeeding very well.
    â€œDavid—can you hear me?”
    â€œYes. What’s the matter?”
    â€œFolly hasn’t come back.”
    â€œIs that all?”
    â€œDavid, you don’t understand.”
    David remembered the suitcase.
    Eleanor went on speaking.
    â€œI rang up my flat, and she was there.”
    â€œThen that’s all right.”
    â€œNo, it isn’t —it’s frightfully wrong. Do you know a man called St. Inigo?”
    David whistled.
    â€œI don’t know him. As a matter of fact I