electric torch spat its light into the
hole.

Clothing at the bottom of it--buried clothing!

He stooped and pulled it to the surface, letting the articles thus
unearthed drop one by one from his fingers. A cap, a pair of trousers, a
coat with a badge on it, a stick with a loop of leather by which to
carry it, a belt, and a number on that belt.

He looked at the number; it was a brass "4." He looked at the badge, and
then rose upright, clamping his jaws hard and understanding.

What he had unearthed was the clothing of the Common keeper who had been
done to death last night--the clothing which the assassin had stolen and
worn.

And he had found that clothing here, hidden in the grounds of Wuthering
Grange! Why, then, in that case, the murderer---- He stopped; and the
thought went no farther--stopped, and releasing the button of the torch,
let utter darkness swing in and surround him.

Some one had entered the ruin--some one was moving about overhead.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE THUNDERBOLT

It was not a man's foot that made that soft noise; his trained ear
recognized that fact at once. A woman, eh? What woman would be coming
here at this time when all the ladies of the household would be in their
rooms dressing for dinner?

He crept in the darkness out of the cell in which he had been digging,
through the one next and through the next again, until he came to the
passage leading to the staircase, and then, dropping on his hands and
knees, went soundlessly up the stone steps.

Above him as he crept upward--as slow as any tortoise and with far less
noise--sounded the woman's faint footfalls pacing the paved floor with
that persistent restlessness which tells of extreme agitation. He had
but just begun to ask himself what that agitation might portend, when
something occurred which caused him to twitch up his head with a jerk
and crouch there, a thing all eyes and ears.

The woman's footsteps had ceased abruptly, brought to a sudden halt by
the ring of others--the nervous, heavy-heeled, fast-falling steps of an
excited man coming across the drawbridge and into the ruin at a pace
which was almost a run; and that man had no more than come into range
of the woman's vision when the thin, eager voice of Lady Katharine
Fordham sounded and made the situation clear.

It was a tryst--the lovers' meeting upon which Cleek had built such high
hopes and upon which he had blundered by the merest fluke.

"Geoff!" sounded