Tatham assented.  Boden paused, leaning on his bicycle.

“Take Threlfall on your way.  I think Faversham would like to see you.  There are some strange things being said.  Preposterous things!  The hatred is extraordinary.”

The two men eyed each other gravely.  Boden added: 

“I have been telling your mother that I think I shall go over to Threlfall for a bit, if Faversham will have me.”

Tatham wondered again.  Faversham, prosperous, had been, it seemed to him, a special target for Boden’s scorn, expressed with a fine range of revolutionary epithet.

But calamity of any kind—­for this queer saint—­was apt to change all the values of things.

They were just separating when Tatham, with sudden compunction, asked for news of Mrs. Melrose, and Felicia.

“I had almost forgotten them!”

“Your mother did not tell me much.  They were troubled about Mrs. Melrose, I think, and Undershaw was coming.  The poor little girl turned very white—­no tears—­but she was clinging to your mother.”

Tatham’s face softened, but he said nothing.  The road to Threlfall presented itself, and he turned his horse toward it.

“And Miss Penfold?” said Boden, quietly.  “You arrived before the newspapers?  Good.  I think, before I return, I shall go and have a talk with Miss Penfold.”

And mounting his bicycle he rode off.  Tatham looking after him, felt uncomfortably certain that Boden knew pretty well all there was to know about Lydia—­Faversham—­and himself.  But he did not resent it.

Tatham found Threlfall a beleaguered place, police at the gates and in the house; the chief constable and the Superintendent of police established in the dining-room, as the only room tolerably free from the all encumbering collections, and interviewing one person after another.

Tatham asked to see the chief constable.  He made his way into the gallery, which was guarded by police, for although the body of Melrose had been removed to an upper room, the blood-stain on the Persian carpet, the overturned chair and picture, the mud-marks on the wall remained untouched, awaiting the coroner’s jury, which was to meet in the house that evening.

As Tatham approached the room which was now the headquarters of the police, he met coming out of it a couple of men; one small and sinewy, with the air of a disreputable athlete, the other a tall pasty-faced man in a shabby frock coat, with furtive eyes.  The first was Nash, Melrose’s legal factotum through many years; the other was one of the clerks in the Pengarth office, who was popularly supposed to have made much money out of the Threlfall estate, through a long series of small peculations never discovered by his miserly master.  They passed Tatham with downcast eyes and an air of suppressed excitement which did not escape him.  He found the chief constable pacing up and down, talking in subdued tones, and with a furrowed brow, to the Superintendent of police.