The attention which Pyot vouchsafed to his narration greatly enhanced Master Toogood’s own delight therein, more especially as the petty constable had, as if instinctively, measured his steps with those of the younger man and was accompanying him on his way towards the Court.

Courage told his attentive listener all about Master Busy’s surmises and his determination to probe the secrets of the mysterious crime, which—­to be quite truthful—­the worthy butler with the hard toes had scented long ere it was committed, seeing that he used to spend long hours in vast discomfort in the forked branches of the old elms which surrounded the pavilion at the boundary of the park.

Toogood had no notion if Master Busy had ever discovered anything of interest in the neighborhood of that pavilion, and he was quite, quite sure that the saintly man had never dared to venture inside that archaic building, which had the reputation of being haunted; still, he was over-gratified to perceive that the petty constable was vastly interested in his tale—­in spite of these obvious defects in its completeness—­and that, moreover, Master Pyot showed no signs of turning on his heel, but continued to trudge along the gloomy road in company with Sir Marmaduke’s youngest serving-man.

Thus Editha, when she ran out of Mistress Lambert’s cottage, her ears ringing with the fanatic’s curses, her heart breaking with the joy of that reverent filial kiss imprinted upon her hands, found the road and the precincts of the cottage entirely deserted.

The night was pitch dark after the rain.  Great heavy clouds still hung above, and an icy blast caught her skirts as she lifted the latch of the gate and turned into the open.

But she cared little about the inclemency of the weather.  She knew her way about well enough and her mind was too full of terrible thoughts of what was real, to yield to the subtle and feeble fears engendered by imaginings of the supernatural.

Nay! she would, mayhap, have welcomed the pixies and goblins who by mischievous pranks had claimed her attention.  They would, of a truth, have diverted her mind from the contemplation of that awful and monstrous deed accomplished by the man whom she would meet anon.

If he whom the villagers had called Adam Lambert was her son, Henry Adam de Chavasse, then Sir Marmaduke was the murderer of her child.  All the curses which the old Quakeress had so vengefully poured upon her were as nothing compared with that awful, that terrible fact.

Her son had been murdered ... her eldest son whom she had never known, and she—­involuntarily mayhap, compulsorily certes—­had in a measure helped to bring about those events which had culminated in that appalling crime.

She had known of Marmaduke’s monstrous fraud on the confiding girl whom he now so callously abandoned to her fate.  She had known of it and helped him towards its success by luring her other son Richard to that vile gambling den where he had all but lost his honor, or else his reason.