Daintree got his hat with alacrity, and together the gentlemen let themselves quietly out by the front door; nevertheless Claire heard them in her room, though her aunt, who was still with her, did not.
They walked between the same budding hedgerows and moonlit fields which Tom Erichsen and the wretched Blaydes had looked on earlier in the night. They passed within two hundred paces of the spot where the Captain’s body was even then lying dead and undiscovered. They woke a sleeping hamlet, and were sharply informed through an angrily opened window that Captain Blaydes had come home, but had dressed and left again in a hackney-coach, shortly after ten.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No; but I heard him tell the coachman it was only a mile.”
The window was shut down. The pair returned. They had spoken little on their way to West End; not one word did they exchange on the way back; but Nicholas Harding shook a little at the knees, and his companion watched him shrewdly.
As they pushed open the gate, a light vanished from an upper window, to reappear in the hall. Daintree took the other by the arm, and whispered, “That’s Miss Harding! Now you will see if I was wrong.”
And, indeed, the door was open before they reached it, and Claire on the step, candle in hand, the tallow streaming in the draught, and dashing unheeded against the pink crape and the white satin which she had never taken off. Her face looked grey and old, with young eyes burning out of place.
“Well?”
