There was a tap at the window behind him.  He unfastened the pane, and a spectral hand came through with a coin.  Mr. Crows took it, the hand disappeared, to be replaced by another, more dirty than spectral, with a coin in the outstretched palm, like its predecessor.

“You see,” said Mr. Crows, when he had collected six shillings in this manner.  “What’s the need for to look at them?  I’ve learnt them to hand in their fares this way.  Saves time and talk for nothing.  Why should I look at a lot of fat old wommen?  I ain’t paid for that.  It’s quite enough to let them set in my cab, wearing out my cushions with their great fat bodies, without looking at them.”  He eyed Barrant with some sternness.

“But this was not a fat old woman,” said Barrant.  “She was a pretty young girl.”

“Ma’ad or widder, it’s all the same to me,” returned the misogynist.  “Some holds with the sex and finds them soothing, but I was never took up with them myself.  I prefers beer.  Every man to his taste.”

“Did any of the passengers alight at the crossroads?”

They were nearing the cross-roads as he spoke, and the rude outline of the wayside cross loomed out of the shadows directly ahead.

“I couldn’t tell you that, neither.  I always stop at the cross-roads, in and out.  It’s one of my regular stopping-places.  Come to think of it, though, somebody did get out at the cross-roads last night.”

“A man or woman?” asked Barrant with eagerness.

“A woman.  She went off acrass the moors that way.”  Mr. Crows pointed an indifferent whip into the blackness which rested like a pall between the white road and the distant roaring sea.  “She was a wunner to go, too—­out of sight in a moment, she was.”

“Thank you.  I’ll get down here, too.”

As the wagonette stopped at the cross-roads Barrant jumped down from his seat and disappeared in the indicated direction before Mr. Crows could summon his slow wits to determine the value of the coin which the detective had pressed into his passively expectant palm.

CHAPTER XVI

The twilight had deepened into darkness when Barrant reached Flint House.  A faint ray of light flickered from the kitchen window on the giant cliffs, like a taper from a doll’s house.  He approached the window by a line of rocks which guarded it like sentinels, and looked in.

Within, Mrs. Thalassa sat alone by the table in a drooping attitude of dejection or stupor.  Her head was bent over her crossed hands, which rested on the table, and her grey hair, escaping from the back comb which fastened it, fell on both sides of her face.  An oil lamp smoked on the table beside her, sending forth a cloud of black vapour like an unbottled genie, but she did not heed it.  There was something uncanny in her complete detachment from the restless activity of life.  The dead man lying upstairs was not more still.