The Astonishing Adventure of Jane SmithWentworth, Patricia
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The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith
Wentworth, Patricia
Adventure stories; Cousins -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories
Jane looked at Mr. Molloy, and experienced some very strange sensations.
He might sell her to Ember next moment, but for this moment he was
utterly sincere and as simple as a child. His sentiments were not
hypocrisy. They represented real feeling and emotion; but feeling,
emotion, and sentiment had been trained to take the wall obediently at
the bidding of what Mr. Molloy would call business. For all her youth,
Jane felt a rush of pity for anything so played upon from without, so
ungoverned from within as this big handsome man who stood there talking
earnestly of his boyhood’s home.
“Why don’t you go back and see it all again?” she said.
“Well, I’d like to,” said Mr. Molloy, “but what good’ll my house in
Galway do me if I waken up some fine night with a knife in me heart or a
bomb gone off under me bed?”
It seemed a difficult question to answer.
Molloy began to pace the room.
“I must think,” he said.
All the time that Jane had been talking, part of her mind had been
continually occupied with the question of the lists, those lists of
towns and the agents in each who were to be entrusted with the work of
destruction. It might not be so difficult to get hold of them, but to
get hold of them without their being missed by Ember ... that was the
difficulty. She had only to drop her right hand to the bench on which
she sat and it touched the flimsy sheets.
Whilst Molloy was discoursing of his birthplace, she considered more
than one plan. She must not precipitate Ember’s suspicions until she
could place this evidence in Henry’s hands. If she took the lists and
Ember missed them, he would suspect and accuse Molloy, and Molloy would
most certainly exonerate himself at her expense. On the other hand, if
she let the lists slip when they were under her hand, who was to say
whether the opportunity would recur. Ember would return. He already
distrusted Molloy, and what would be more likely than that he would
remove such incriminating papers from Molloy’s care?
Then, quite suddenly, Jane knew what she must do. She didn’t want to do
it, but she knew she must. She must get the papers now, she must copy
them, and she must put them back before daybreak whilst the Anarchist
Uncle was asleep. Jane had never contemplated anything which frightened
her half so much as the idea of putting those papers back in that
discouraging hour before the dawn, but she knew that it must be done.
As Mr. Molloy walked up and down frowning intently, there were moments
when his back was turned towards Jane. The first time this happened
Jane’s hand took hold of the thin papers and doubled them in half. The
next time that it happened she doubled them again. She went on doubling
them until the large thin sheaf had become a small fat wad. Then whilst
Molloy’s back was turned she lifted her skirt and pushed the wad down
inside her stocking top. When Molloy faced her again her hands were
folded on her lap.
“I really must be going,” she said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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