"No," she cried, her hollow eyes riveted on his. "No. She was coming to me this afternoon, everything was arranged, ready and waiting. And now she’s gone, and you, you men here, want to find her. What is it? There’s something strange, something I don’t know." Her glance moved over the watching faces. They were ominously unresponsive. Where she looked for hope or help she saw nothing but a veiled menace, every moment growing clearer. "What is it?" she cried, her voice rising to a higher note, shrill and shaking. "What is the matter? Tell me. You know—you know something you’re hiding from me?" "We think that of you, Mrs. Whitehall," said the chief, ponderous and lowering, "and we want to hear it. The time has come for frankness. Hold nothing back for, as you say, we _know_." The woman gave a gasp and took a step nearer to him: "Then for God’s sake tell me. Where has she gone?" His answer came like the spring of an animal on its prey: "To join her lover, Johnston Barker." If he expected to have it strike with an impact he was not disappointed. She fell back as if threatened by a blow, and for a second stood transfixed, aghast, her lower jaw dropped, staring at him. Amazement isn’t the word for the look on her face, it was a stupefaction, a paralysis of astonishment. The shock was so violent it swept away all anxiety for her daughter, but it also snapped the last frail remnant of her nerve. From her pale lips her voice broke in a wild, hysterical cry: "Her lover! He was her _father_!" CHAPTER XVIII JACK TELLS THE STORY In the moment of silence which followed that sentence you could hear the fire snap and the tick of the clock on the mantel. I saw the men’s faces held in expressions of amazement so intense they looked like caricatures. I saw Mrs. Whitehall try to say something, then with a rustle and a broken cry crumple up in a chair, her face hidden, stuttering, choked sounds coming from behind her hands. That broke the tension. Like a piece of machinery momentarily out of gear, the group adjusted itself and snapped back into action. All but me—I stood as I had been standing when Mrs. Whitehall spoke those words. My outward vision saw their moving figures, their backs as they crowded round her, a hand that held a glass to her lips, her face bent toward the glass, ashen and haggard. I saw but realized nothing. For a moment I was on another plane of existence, seemed to be shot up into it. I don’t tell it right—a fellow who doesn’t know how to write can’t explain a feeling like that. You’ve got to fill it in out of your imagination. A man who’s been in hell gets suddenly out—that’s the best way I can describe it.