Part 56 (2/2)

He hurried towards her, breathless, cutting all preliminaries--

”I was coming to find you. I arrived this morning. There is something wrong! I have just been to the house, and there is no one there.”

”What do you mean?”

”No one. I went to Daunt's rooms. Everything locked. The house absolutely dark--everywhere. And I know that he has had the strictest orders!”

Without a word, she began to run, and he beside her. When she slackened, he told her that while in London he had made the most skilful enquiries he could devise as to the plot he believed to be on foot. But--like Delia's own--they had been quite fruitless. Those persons who had shared suspicion with him in December were now convinced that the thing was dropped. All that he had ascertained was that Miss Marvell was in town, apparently recovered, and Miss Andrews with her.

”Well--and were you pleased with your raid?” he asked her, half mockingly, as he opened the gate of Monk Lawrence for her.

She resented the question, and the tone of it, remembering his first grandiloquent letter to her.

”_You_ ought to be,” she said, drily. ”It was the kind of thing you recommended.”

”In that letter I wrote you! I ought to have apologised to you for that letter long ago. I am afraid it was an exercise. Oh, I felt it, I suppose, when I wrote it.”

There was a touch of something insolent in his voice.

She made no reply. If it had not been for the necessity which yoked them, she would not have spent another minute in his company, so repellent to her had he become--both in the inner and the outer man.

She tried only to think of him as an ally in a desperate campaign.

They hastened up the Monk Lawrence drive. The house stood still and peaceful in the February afternoon. The rooks from the rookery behind were swirling about and over the roofs, filling the air with monotonous sound which only emphasized the silence below. A sheet of snowdrops lay white in the courtyard, where a child's go-cart upset, held the very middle of the stately approach to the house.

Delia went to the front door, and rang the bell--repeatedly. Not a sound, except the dim echoes of the bell itself from some region far inside.

”No good!” said Lathrop. ”Now come to the back.” They went round to the low addition at the back of the house, where Daunt and his family had now lived for many months. Here also there was n.o.body. The door was locked. The blinds were drawn down. Impossible to see into the rooms, and neither calling nor knocking produced any response.

Lathrop stood thinking.

”Absolutely against orders! I know--for Daunt himself told me--that he had promised Lang never to leave the house without putting some deputy he could trust in charge. He has gone and left no deputy--or the deputy he did leave has deserted.”

”What's the nearest house--or cottage?”

”The Gardeners' cottages, beyond the kitchen garden. Only one of them occupied now, I believe. Daunt used to live there before he moved into the house. Let's go there!”

They ran on. The walled kitchen garden was locked, but they found a way round it to where three creeper-grown cottages stood in a pleasant lonely s.p.a.ce girdled by beech-woods. One only was inhabited, but from that the smoke was going up, and a babble of children's voices emerged.

Lathrop knocked. There was a sudden sound, and then a silence within.

In a minute however the door was opened, and a strapping black-eyed young woman stood on the threshold looking both sulky and astonished.

”Are you Daunt's niece?” said Lathrop.

”I am, Sir. What do you want with him?”

”Why isn't he at Monk Lawrence?” asked Lathrop roughly. ”He told me himself he was not to leave the house unguarded.”

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