The possibility of disbelief did not dawn upon him.  He overlooked that his listener was also his custodian and judge—­the suspicious arbiter of a belated story told by one whose own actions were in the highest degree suspicious.  His overburdened mind forgot these things in the excitement of hope.  He talked with the candour and freedom of one young man confiding in another.  When he had finished he looked at his companion expectantly, but Barrant’s eyes were coldly official.

“A strange story!” he said.

“A true one,” Charles eagerly rejoined.  “Thalassa has been walking along the coast ever since in the expectation of finding this man.  He will kill him if he meets him.”

It was Barrant’s lot to listen to many strange stories which were always true, according to the narrators, but generally they caused him to feel ashamed of the poverty of human invention.  He was not immediately concerned to discover whether Thalassa’s story was true or false, or whether it had been concocted between him and Charles with the object of deceiving the authorities.  The consideration of that infamous brownfaced scoundrel’s confession could be postponed—­if it had ever been made.  The present business was with Charles Turold.  There was something infernally mysterious in his unexpected reappearance in that spot.  He had gone to London when he disappeared—­he admitted that.  What had brought him back?  To see Thalassa, as he said, in order to try and get at the truth?  Nonsense!  He—­Barrant—­was not simple enough to believe that.  What then?

Barrant was not prepared to supply a ready answer to that question.  But his trained ear had detected many gaps in the young man’s own narrative which, filled in, might give it.  Turold knew more than he had said—­he was keeping things back.  Again—­what things?  Behind him stood the shadowy figure of the girl and her unexplained flight.  Barrant’s instinct told him that Charles was shielding her.  He turned to the task of endeavouring to reach the truth.

“Let’s go back a bit,” he said casually.  “You’ve left one or two points in your own story unexplained.  What about the key?”

“The key?” Charles started slightly.  You mean—­”

“I mean the key of the room upstairs.  You said you found the key in the passage outside.  You must have locked the door after you and taken it away with you.”

“I did,” replied the young man, in some hesitation.

“For what reason?”

Charles realized that he was on very thin ice.  In his intense preoccupation with Thalassa’s story he had forgotten that his own impulsive actions on that night must be construed as proof of his own guilt or bear too literal interpretation of having been done to shield Sisily.  He saw that he was in a position of extraordinary difficulty.

“I was hardly conscious of what I was doing, at the time,” he said.

“You took the key away with you?”