"
Twice over Dunn read this strange, disturbing message, and then a
third time, and he made a little gesture of annoyance for it did
not seem to him that the words he read made sense, or else it was
that his brain no longer worked normally, and could not interpret
them.
"Oh, but that's absurd," he said aloud.
He looked all around him, surprised to see that the face of the
country-side had not changed in any way, but was all just as it had
been before this letter had been put into his hands.
He began to read a third, but stopped half-way through the first
sentence.
"Then it's Walter all the time," he muttered. "Walter--Walter!"
CHAPTER XXVI
A RACE AGAINST TIME
Even when he had said this aloud it was still as though he could not
grasp its full meaning.
"Walter," he repeated vaguely. "Walter."
His thoughts, that had seemed as frozen by the sudden shock of the
tremendous revelation so unconsciously made to him by Ella, began
to stir and move again, and almost at once, with an extraordinary
and abnormal rapidity.
As a drowning man is said to see flash before his eyes the whole
history and record of his life, so now Dunn saw the whole story of
his life-long friendship with Walter pictured before him.
For when he was very small, Walter had been to him like an elder
brother, and when he was older, it was Walter who had taught him to
ride and to shoot, to hunt and to fish, and when he was at school
it was Walter to whom he looked up as the dashing young man of the
world, who knew all life's secrets, and when he was at college it
was Walter who had helped him out of the inevitable foolish scrapes
into which it is the custom of the undergraduate to fall.
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