"how say you? Were you likewise busied in preparing the
gentlewomen for their journey?"

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.

COUNTERPLOT.

A man to be very much pitied was poor Mr Roberts. Not only had he to
pacify the priest, but Mistress Grena's line of defence, plausible as it
sounded, had unhappily crossed and invalidated the excuse he had
intended to make for himself. His faint, hazy purpose up to that time
had been to deny any knowledge of the escape; but after it had been thus
represented as a natural, every-day occurrence, how was he to keep up
the story? Yet he had no other ready.

"No, Father--ay, it--I was a-bed," was his blundering reply.

The priest's voice was sweet as a newly-tuned piano.

"Was it not strange, my son, that you heard no sounds from beneath? Or
went you up, knowing what was passing?"

What was the poor man to do? If he acknowledged that he knew of the
escape of the fugitives, he laid himself open to the charge of "aiding
and abetting"; if he denied it, he practically denied also the truth of
Grena's defence. At that moment he would have given every acre and
shilling in his possession to be free from this horrible
cross-questioning.

The cat watched the poor mouse wriggle with grim satisfaction. Either
way, it would come to its claws at last.

Suddenly the scene of the morning was reproduced to the mind's eye of
the tortured man. Roger Hall's voice seemed to say again--"Have you
asked Him, Master?" Faintly, tremblingly in the unwontedness of the
act, the request was made, and even that slight contact with the
unchanging Rock steadied the wavering feet. He must speak truth, and
uphold Grena.

"Father," he said in a changed tone, "my sister told you true. The
journey was hastened, and that suddenly."

The change in his tone puzzled the priest. What had come to the man, in
that momentary interval, to nerve him thus anew?

"How came the news, my son?"

Mr Roberts was thankfully able to answer that he knew not.

"But surely, with so much baggage as Mistress Collenwood must have borne
withal, the number of horses that left your house could not but be noted
of them in the vicinage. Yet I am told no sound was heard."

"My sister sent the most part of her baggage away before her," was the
answer.

"Remember," said the Rector sternly, "the sin you incur if you deceive a
priest!"

"I have not spoken one untrue word, Father."

At that moment the door-bell was rung, and answer