nteresting, he could not have sworn to
it. They loitered by the road and came slowly back to the bungalow,
where they parted at the gate, and he watched her go in, hoping she
might turn her head, but she did not, and Hartley took his way towards
his own house and thought very little of Absalom or the Rev. Francis
Heath. One thing he did think of, and that was that Mrs. Wilder had
looked at him earnestly, and said that she wished he was not "mixed up"
in anything likely to bring uneasiness to the mind of the Rector of St.
Jude's Church. "Mixed up" was a curious way of expressing his connection
with the case, but Hartley felt that he knew what she meant. He pulled
at his short moustache and wished with all his heart that he really did
know; but all the wishes in the world could not help him out of a
professional dilemma.

Mrs. Wilder had not looked round, though she very well knew that Hartley
was waiting and hoping that she would, and once she had turned the first
bend she touched the pony with her heel and cantered up the hill,
throwing the reins to the _syce_ who came in answer to her impatient
call.

"Idiot," she said, as she shut the door of her room and flung her _topi_
on the bed, and she repeated the word several times with increasing
animosity and vigour. She hated Hartley at that moment, and felt under
no further obligation to hide her real feelings; and then Mrs. Wilder
sat down and thought hard.

The mental power of exaggerating danger is limitless, and she could not
deny that her fear was playing tricks with her nerves. She knew that she
had done creditably under the strain of acute nervous tension, but she
felt also that much more of the same thing would be unendurable.

Draycott came in to luncheon, and she was there to receive him, but even
to his careless eye, Clarice was oddly abstracted, and he glanced at her
curiously, wondering what it was that occupied her mind and made her
frown as she thought.

She could not get away from the grip of her morning interview. Try as
she would, she could not shake it off. It caught her back in the middle
of her talk, made her answer at random, and held her with a terrible
power. She considered that there were a thousand other things she might
have said or done, a hundred ways by which she might have appealed to
Hartley, and yet her common sense told her that the less she said on the
subject the better it would be, if, in the end, the Rev. Francis Heath
was led in