Everything was just as it had been those few hours ago, when last he had picked up his broad-brimmed hat from the table and walked out of the cottage into the night.  Everything was the same as it had been when his young girl-wife pushed a leather wallet across the table to him:  the wallet which contained the fortune that he had not yet dared to turn fully to his own account.

Aye! it was all just the same:  for even at this moment as he stood there in the room, Sue, pale and still, faced him from across the table.  For a moment he was silent, nor did anybody speak.  Squire Boatfield felt unaccountably embarrassed, certain that he was intruding, vaguely wondering why the atmosphere in the cottage was so heavy and oppressive.

Behind him, Richard Lambert had quietly closed the front door; the old woman stood in the background; the dusting-cloth which she had been plying so vigorously had dropped out of her hand when the two gentlemen had appeared in her little parlor so unexpectedly.

Sir Marmaduke was the first to break the silence.

“My dear Sue,” he said curtly, “this is a strange place indeed wherein to find your ladyship.”

He cast a sharp, inquiring glance at her, then at his sister-in-law, who was still sitting by the hearth.

“She insisted on coming,” said Mistress de Chavasse with a shrug of the shoulders, “and I had not the power to stop her; I thought it best, therefore, to accompany her.”

She was wearing the cloak and hood which Sir Marmaduke had seen round her shoulders when awhile ago he had met her in the hall of the Court.  Apparently she had started out with Sue in his immediate wake, and now he had a distinct recollection that while the mare was slowly ambling along, he had looked back once or twice and seen two dark figures walking some fifty yards behind him on the road which he himself had just traversed.

At the moment he had imagined that they were some village folk, wending their way towards Acol:  now he was conscious of nerve-racking irritation at the thought that if he had only turned the mare’s head back toward the Court—­as he had at one time intended to do—­he could have averted this present meeting—­it almost seemed like a confrontation—­here, in this cottage on the self-same spot, where thought of murder had first struck upon his brain.

There was something inexplicable, strangely puzzling now in Sue’s attitude.

When de Chavasse had entered, she had risen from her chair and, as if deliberately, had walked over to the spot where she had stood during that momentous interview, when she relinquished her fortune entirely and without protest, into the hands of the man whom she had married, and whom she believed to be her lord.

Her gaze now—­calm and fixed, and withal vaguely searching—­rested on her guardian’s face.  The fixity of her look increased his nerve-tension.  The others, too, were regarding him with varying feelings which were freely expressed in their eyes.  Boatfield seemed upset and somewhat resentful, the old woman sullen, despite the deference in her attitude, Lambert defiant, wrathful, nay! full of an incipient desire to avenge past wrongs.