ire Boatfield and I to understand, Lambert," continued Sir
Marmaduke, speaking to the young man, "that your brother Adam has
unaccountably disappeared since the night on which the foreigner met
with his tragic fate? Nay, Boatfield," he added, turning to the squire,
as Lambert had remained silent, "methinks you, as chief magistrate,
should see your duty clearly. 'Tis a warrant you should sign and
quickly, too, ere a scoundrel slip through the noose of justice. I can
on the morrow to Dover, there to see the chief constable, but Pyot and
his men should not be idle the while."

"What is he saying, my dear?" murmured Mistress Lambert, timorously, as
she clung with pathetic fervor to the young girl beside her, "what is
the trouble?"

"Where is your nephew Adam?" said de Chavasse roughly.

"I do not know," she retorted with amazing strength of voice, as she
gently but firmly disengaged herself from the restraining arms that
would have kept her back. "I do not know," she repeated, "what is it to
thee, where he is? Art accusing him perchance of doing away with that
foreign devil?"

Her voice rose shrill and resonant, echoing in the low-ceilinged room;
her pale eyes, dimmed with many tears, with hard work, and harder piety
were fixed upon the man who had dared to accuse her lad.

He tried not to flinch before that gaze, to keep up the air of mockery,
the sound of a sneer. Outside the murmur of voices had become somewhat
louder, the shuffling of bare feet on the flag-stones could now be
distinctly heard.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE VOICE OF THE DEAD

The next moment a timid knock against the front door caused everyone to
start. A strange eerie feeling descended on the hearts of all, of
innocent and of guilty, of accuser and of defender. The knock seemed to
have come from spectral hands, for 'twas followed by no further sound.

Then again the knock.

Lambert went to the door and opened it.

"Be the quality here?" queried a timid voice.

"Squire Boatfield is here and Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse," replied
Lambert, "what is it, Mat? Come in."

The squire had risen at sound of his name, and now went to the door,
glad enough to shake himself free from that awful oppression which hung
on the cottage like a weight of evil.

"What is it, Mat?" he asked.

A man in rough shirt and coarse breeches and with high boots reaching up
to the thigh was standing humbly in the doorway. He was bareheaded and
his lanky hair, wet with