The Hollow by Agatha Christie

think?
    And Henrietta? (But he didn’t care quite so much about Henrietta. He could, he felt, at a pinch explain to Henrietta. He could never explain to Gerda.)
    And he didn’t, definitely he didn’t want to lose anything.
    All his life he had been a man who took a justifiable number of risks. Risks with patients, risks with treatment, risks with investments. Never a fantastic risk—only the kind of risk that was just beyond the margin of safety.
    If Gerda guessed—if Gerda had the least suspicion….
    But would she have? How much did he really know about Gerda? Normally, Gerda would believe white was black if he told her so. But over a thing like this….
    What had he looked like when he followed Veronica’s tall, triumphant figure out of that window? What had he shown in his face? Had they seen a boy’s dazed, lovesick face? Or had they only observed a man doing a polite duty? He didn’t know. He hadn’t the least idea.
    But he was afraid—afraid for the ease and order and safety of hislife. He’d been mad—quite mad, he thought with exasperation—and then took comfort in that very thought. Nobody would believe, surely, he could have been as mad as that?
    Everybody was in bed and sleep, that was clear. The french window of the drawing room stood half open, left for his return. He looked up again at the innocent, sleeping house. It looked, somehow, too innocent.
    Suddenly he started. He had heard, or he had imagined he heard, the faint closing of a door.
    He turned his head sharply. If someone had come down to the pool, following him there. If someone had waited and followed him back that someone could have taken a higher path and so gained entrance to the house again by the side garden door, and the soft closing of the garden door would have made just the sound that he had heard.
    He looked up sharply at the windows. Was that curtain moving, had it been pushed aside for someone to look out, and then allowed to fall? Henrietta’s room.
    Henrietta! Not Henrietta, his heart cried in a sudden panic. I can’t lose Henrietta!
    He wanted suddenly to fling up a handful of pebbles at her window, to cry out to her.
    â€œCome out, my dear love. Come out to me now and walk with me up through the woods to Shovel Down and there listen—listen to everything that I now know about myself and that you must know, too, if you do not know it already.”
    He wanted to say to Henrietta:
    â€œI am starting again. A new life begins from today. The things that crippled and hindered me from living have fallen away. Youwere right this afternoon when you asked me if I was running away from myself. That is what I have been doing for years. Because I never knew whether it was strength or weakness that took me away from Veronica. I have been afraid of myself, afraid of life, afraid of you.”
    If he were to wake Henrietta and make her come out with him now—up through the woods to where they could watch, together, the sun come up over the rim of the world.
    â€œYou’re mad,” he said to himself. He shivered. It was cold now, late September after all. “What the devil is the matter with you?” he asked himself. “You’ve behaved quite insanely enough for one night. If you get away with it as it is, you’re damned lucky!” What on earth would Gerda think if he stayed out all night and came home with the milk?
    What, for the matter of that, would the Angkatells think?
    But that did not worry him for a moment. The Angkatells took Greenwich time, as it were, from Lucy Angkatell. And to Lucy Angkatell, the unusual always appeared perfectly reasonable.
    But Gerda, unfortunately, was not an Angkatell.
    Gerda would have to be dealt with, and he’d better go in and deal with Gerda as soon as possible.
    Supposing it had been Gerda who had followed him tonight?
    No good saying people didn’t do such things. As a doctor, he knew only too well