oad under the
downs.

It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had
felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp "Hullo!" that made her turn to
glance at him.

Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a shadow
of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and, following
his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in loose, grayish
clothes, as it appeared to her--who was sauntering down the lime-avenue
to the court with the tentative gait of a stranger seeking his way. Her
short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred impression of slightness
and grayness, with something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of
the figure or its garb; but her husband had apparently seen more--seen
enough to make him push past her with a sharp "Wait!" and dash down the
twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for the descent.

A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional clutch
at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to follow him down
more cautiously; and when she had reached the attic landing she paused
again for a less definite reason, leaning over the oak banister to
strain her eyes through the silence of the brown, sun-flecked depths
below. She lingered there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard
the closing of a door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the
shallow flights of steps till she reached the lower hall.

The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and
hall and court were empty. The library door was open, too, and after
listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she quickly crossed
the threshold, and found her husband alone, vaguely fingering the papers
on his desk.

He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but the
shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even, as she
fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.

"What was it? Who was it?" she asked.

"Who?" he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

"The man we saw coming toward the house."

He seemed honestly to reflect. "The man? Why, I thought I saw Peters;
I dashed after him to say a word about the stable-drains, but he had
disappeared before I could get down."

"Disappeared? Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw him."

Boyne shrugged his shoulders. "So I thought; but he must have got up
steam in the interval. What do you say to our trying a scramble up
Meldon