“That’s what I don’t know.  She made me go back when we got to the cross-roads.  She knew as well as I did that the old fool who drives it wasn’t particular as to time, and she worried about my old woman getting scairt if she found herself alone, and me out.  ‘Go back to her, Thalassa,’ she said, ‘I shall be all right now.’  That was just after she’d made me promise to tell nobody that she’d been to see her father that night.  And, by God, I kept my word.  Nobody got anything out of me, though they tried hard enough.  Well, when she sent me back I went, leaving her standing, for I had my own reason for going.  When I looked back after a bit I saw her standing there by the light of the dirty little lamp above the cross-roads.”

“Did you see the wagonette on the road?”

“Not a sign of it.  Just her—­alone.”

A faint hope died in Charles’s breast.  Even the drunken irregularity of a Cornish cabman told against Sisily.  But that point was not so immediately important as Thalassa’s story that the murder had been committed during his absence from Flint House.  Although his own experience supported that supposition, Charles was reluctant to accept a theory which plunged the events of that night into deeper mystery than ever.

“Well, go on,” he said.  “What did you find when you got back?”

“The house was dark and the door open.  The wind was coming in from the sea sharp enough to take your head off your shoulders, and I thought perhaps I’d jammed the door without closing it, and it had blowed open with the wind.  But when I got inside I heered something like moaning.  I thought that might be the wind too, for it’s for ever screeching up and down the passages like a devil, specially o’ nights.  I—­” He stopped suddenly, with a cautious sidelong look at his listener.

“Yes, yes!” cried Charles.  “And what then?”

Thalassa went on, but a little moodily.

“I went along to the kitchen and found the old woman lying on the floor, in a kind of fit or faint, making the queer noise I’d just heered.  When I picked her up she opened her eyes, laughing and crying and making mouths as she pointed to the ceiling.  I could get nothing out of her for a while.  Then she mutters something about a crash upstairs, and goes off into another fit.  I carried her into her bedroom and went upstairs as fast as my legs would take me.  There was a light under his door, but he didn’t answer when I knocked.  I tried to open it, but it was locked inside.  In a bit there was a knock downstairs.  You know what happened after that.”  He lapsed into silence again, with another look at the young man.

“That was when my aunt and her husband and Dr. Ravenshaw came to the door?” said Charles, filling in the pause.  “But how was it that you told them that you feared something had happened to your master?  Was that pure guesswork on your part?  You hadn’t been in the room, you say.”

“I had to tell them something, hadn’t I?” retorted the other sullenly.  “If I hadn’t told them that, it would a’ all come out about me going out with Miss Sisily, and not into the coal cellar, as I said.”