The figure disappeared; he heard the closing of the window, which was soon dark.  Then he crept down to the farm wall, and round the corner of it to that outer cart-shed, where he had bound up his bleeding hand on the night when Halsey—­silly ass!—­had seen the ghost.  He did not dare to smoke lest spark or smell might betray him.  Sitting on a heap of sacks in a sheltered corner, his hands hanging over his knees, he spent some long time brooding and pondering—­conscious all the while of the hidden and silent life of the house and farm at his back.  By now he fancied he understood the evening ways of the place.  The two girls went up to bed first, about nine; the two ladies, about an hour later; and the farm bailiff as a rule did not sleep on the premises, though there was a bed in the loft over the stable which could be used on occasion.  That window, too, through which he had watched the pair of lovers, when the Yankee discovered him—­that also seemed to fit into a scheme.

Yes!—­the Yankee had discovered him.  His start, his sudden movement as though to make a rush at the window, had shown it.  Meanwhile Delane had not waited for developments.  Quick as thought he had made for one of those sunken climbing lanes in which the chalk downs of the district abound, a lane which lay to the south of the farm, while the green terraced path connected with the ghost-story lay to the north of it.  No doubt there had been a hue and cry, a search of the farm and its immediate neighbourhood.  But the night was dark and the woods wide.  Once in their shelter, he had laughed at pursuit.  What had the Yankee said to Rachel?  And since he had stopped her in the lane, what had Rachel been saying to the Yankee?  Had she yet explained that the face he had seen at the window—­supposing always that he had told her what he had seen—­and why shouldn’t he?—­was not the face of a casual tramp or lunatic, but the face of a discarded husband, to whom all the various hauntings and apparitions at the farm had been really due?

That was the question—­the all-important question.  Clearly some one—­Ellesborough probably—­had given a warning to the police.  On what theory?—­ghost?—­tramp?—­or husband?

Or had Rachel just held her tongue, and had the Yankee been led to believe that the husband—­for Rachel must have owned up about the husband though she did call herself Miss Henderson!—­was still some thousands of miles away—­in Canada—­safely dead and buried, as far as Rachel was concerned?

On the whole, he thought it most probable that Rachel had held her tongue about his reappearance.  If she had thought it worth while to bribe him so heavily, it was not very likely that she would now herself have set the American on the track of a secret which she so evidently did not want an expectant bridegroom to know.

The American—­d—­n him!  A furious and morbid jealousy rushed upon the man crouching under the cart-shed.  The world was rapidly reducing itself for him to these two figures—­figures of hate—­figures against whom he felt himself driven by a kind of headlong force, a force of destruction.