“I’m afraid there’s a good deal to do before you’ll be seeing that, Mr. Lindsey,” answered the prospective owner.  “We’re not out of the wood yet, you know.”

We certainly were not out of the wood—­so far as I was concerned, those last words might have been prophetic, as, a little later, I was inclined to think Maisie’s had been before she went off in the car.  The rest of them, Mr. Lindsey and his group, Murray and his, had driven up from Berwick in the first conveyances they could get at that time of night, and they now went off to where they had been waiting in a neighbouring shed.  They wanted me to go with them—­but I was anxious about my bicycle, a nearly new machine.  I had stowed it away as securely as I could under some thick undergrowth on the edge of the woods, but the downpour of rain had been so heavy that I knew it must have soaked through the foliage, and that I should have a nice lot of rust to face, let alone a saturated saddle.  So I went away across the park to where I had left it, and the others drove off to Berwick—­and so both Mr. Lindsey and myself broke our solemn words to Maisie.  For now I was alone—­and I certainly did not anticipate more danger.

But not only danger, but the very threatening of death was on me as I went my way.  We had stayed some time in Hathercleugh House, and the dawn had broken before we left.  The morning came clear and bright after the storm, and the newly-risen sun—­it was just four o’clock, and he was nicely above the horizon—­was transforming the clustering raindrops on the firs and pines into glistening diamonds as I plunged into the thick of the woods.  I had no other thought at that moment but of getting home and changing my clothes before going to Andrew Dunlop’s to tell the news—­when, as I crossed a narrow cut in the undergrowth, I saw, some distance away, a man’s head slowly look out from the trees.  I drew back on the instant, watching.  Fortunately—­or unfortunately—­he was not looking in my direction, and did not catch even a momentary glance of me, and when he twisted his neck in my direction I saw that he was the man we had been talking of, and whom I now knew to be Dr. Meekin.  And it flashed on me at once that he was hanging about for Hollins—­all unconscious that Hollins was lying dead there in the old tower.

So—­it was not he who had driven that murderous knife into Hollins’s throat!

I watched him—­myself securely hidden.  He came out of his shelter, crossed the cut, went through the belt of wood which I had just passed, and looked out across the park to the house—­all this I saw by cautiously edging through the trees and bushes behind me.  He was a good forty yards away from me at that time, but I could see the strained, anxious expression on his face.  Things had gone wrong—­Hollins and the car had not met him where he had expected them—­and he was trying to find out what had happened.  And once he made a movement as if he would skirt the coppices and make for the tower, which lay right opposite, but with an open space between it and us—­and then he as suddenly drew back, and began to go away among the trees.