The three of us went away from the bank manager’s house struggling with the various moods peculiar to our individual characters—­Mr. Portlethorpe, being naturally a nervous man, given to despondency, was greatly upset, and manifested his emotions in sundry ejaculations of a dark nature; I, being young, was full of amazement at the news just given us and of the excitement of hunting down the man we knew as Sir Gilbert Carstairs.  But I am not sure that Mr. Lindsey struggled much with anything—­he was cool and phlegmatic as usual, and immediately began to think of practical measures.

“Look here, Portlethorpe,” he said, as soon as we were in the motor car which we had chartered from Newcastle station, “we’ve got to get going in this matter at once—­straight away!  We must be in Edinburgh as early as possible in the morning.  Be guided by me—­come straight back to Berwick, stop the night with me at my house, and we’ll be on our way to Edinburgh by the very first train—­we can get there early, by the time the banks are open.  There’s another reason why I want you to come—­I’ve some documents that I wish you to see—­documents that may have a very important bearing on this affair.  There’s one in my pocket-book now, and you’ll be astonished when you hear how it came into my possession.  But it’s not one-half so astonishing as another that I’ve got at my house.”

I remembered then that we had been so busily engaged since our return from the North that morning that we had had no time to go into the matter of the letter which Mr. Gavin Smeaton had entrusted to Mr. Lindsey—­here, again, was going to be more work of the ferreting-out sort.  But Mr. Portlethorpe, it was clear, had no taste for mysteries, and no great desire to forsake his own bed, even for Mr. Lindsey’s hospitality, and it needed insistence before he consented to go back to Berwick with us.  Go back, however, he did; and before midnight we were in our own town again, and passing the deserted streets towards Mr. Lindsey’s home, I going with the others because Mr. Lindsey insisted that it was now too late for me to go home, and I should be nearer the station if I slept at his place.  And just before we got to the house, which was a quiet villa standing in its own grounds, a little north of the top end of the town, a man who was sauntering ahead of us, suddenly turned and came up to Mr. Lindsey, and in the light of a street lamp I recognized in him the Hathercleugh butler.

Mr. Lindsey recognized the man, too—­so also did Mr. Portlethorpe; and they both came to a dead halt, staring.  And both rapped out the same inquiry, in identical words: 

“Some news?”

I looked as eagerly at the butler as they did.  He had been sour enough and pompous enough in his manner and attitude to me that night of my call on his master, and it surprised me now to see how polite and suave and—­in a fashion—­insinuating he was in his behaviour to the two solicitors.  He was a big, fleshy, strongly-built fellow, with a rather flabby, deeply-lined face and a pallid complexion, rendered all the paler by his black overcoat and top hat; and as he stood there, rubbing his hands, glancing from Mr. Lindsey to Mr. Portlethorpe, and speaking in soft, oily, suggestive accents, I felt that I disliked him even more than when he had addressed me in such supercilious accents at the doors of Hathercleugh.