She glanced at the unlimited wealth still crushed in her hand, and then she carefully dropped the fortune down the neck of her frock....  Stealing?  She repulsed the idea with violent disdain.  What she had accomplished against her father was not a crime, but a vengeance....  She would never be found in London.  It was impossible.  Her plan seemed to her to be perfect in each detail, except one.  She was not the right sort of girl to execute it.  She was very shy.  She suspected that no other girl could really be as shy as she was.  She recalled dreadful rare moments with her mother in strange drawing-rooms.  Still, she would execute the plan even if she died of fright.  A force within her would compel her to execute it.  This force did not make for happiness; on the contrary, it uncomfortably scared her; but it was irresistible.

Something on the brow of the road from Colchester attracted her attention.  It was a handcart, pushed by a labourer and by Police Inspector Keeble, whom she liked.  Following the handcart over the brow came a loose procession of villagers, which included no children, because the children were in school.  Except on a Sunday Audrey had never before seen a procession of villagers, and these villagers must have been collected out of the fields, for the procession was going in the direction of, and not away from, the village.  The handcart was covered with a tarpaulin....  She knew what had happened; she knew infallibly.  Skirting the boundary of the grounds, she reached the main entrance to Flank Hall thirty seconds before the handcart.  The little dog, delighted in a new adventure, yapped ecstatically at her heels, and then bounded onwards to meet the Inspector and the handcart.

“Run and tell yer mother, Miss Moze,” Inspector Keeble called out in a carrying whisper.  “There’s been an accident.  He ditched the car near Ardleigh cross-roads, trying to avoid some fowls.”

Mr. Moze, hurrying too fast to meet the Bishop of Colchester, had met a greater than the Bishop.

Audrey glanced an instant with a sick qualm at the outlines of the shape beneath the tarpaulin, and ran.

In the dining-room, over the speck of fire, Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate were locked in a deep intimate gossip.

“Mother!” cried Audrey, and then sank like a sack.

“Why!  The little thing’s fainted!” Miss Ingate exclaimed in a voice suddenly hoarse.

CHAPTER III

THE LEGACY

Audrey and Miss Ingate were in the late Mathew Moze’s study, fascinated—­as much unconsciously as consciously—­by the thing which since its owner’s death had grown every hour more mysterious and more formidable—­the safe.  It was a fine afternoon.  The secondary but still grandiose enigma of the affair, Mr. Cowl, could be heard walking methodically on the gravel in the garden.  Mr. Cowl was the secretary of the National Reformation Society.