From a distant stile between two fields Mr. Travers, some hundred yards ahead, was waving directions and pointing to the left.

“Go to Jericho!” snapped Mr. Handford, but not loud enough for Ernest Travers to hear him.

A little ring of bells throbbed thin music.  It rose and fell on the easterly breeze and a squat grey tower, over which floated a white ensign on a flagstaff, appeared upon a little knoll of trees in the midst of the village of Chadlands.

Presently the bells stopped, and the flag was brought down to half-mast.  Mr. Travers had reached the church.

“A maddening sort of man,” said Miles Handford, who marked these phenomena.  “Be sure Sir Walter never told him to do anything of that sort.  He has taken it upon himself—­a theatrical mind.  If I were the vicar—­”

Elsewhere Dr. Mannering heard what Henry Lennox could tell him as they returned to the manor house together.  He displayed very deep concern combined with professional interest.  He recalled the story that Sir Walter had related on the previous night.

“Not a shadow of evidence—­a perfectly healthy little woman; and it will be the same here as sure as I’m alive,” he said.  “To think—­ we shot side by side yesterday, and I remarked his fine physique and wonderful high spirits—­a big, tough fellow.  How’s poor Mary?”

“She is pretty bad, but keeping her nerve, as she would be sure to do,” declared the other.

Sir Walter was with his daughter when Mannering arrived.  The doctor had been a crony of the elder for many years.  He was about the average of a country physician—­a hard-bitten, practical man who loved his profession, loved sport, and professed conservative principles.  Experience stood in place of high qualifications, but he kept in touch with medical progress, to the extent of reading about it and availing himself of improved methods and preparations when opportunity offered.  He examined the dead man very carefully, indicated how his posture might be rendered more normal, and satisfied himself that human power was incapable of restoring the vanished life.  He could discover no visible indication of violence and no apparent excuse for Tom May’s sudden end.  He listened with attention to the little that Henry Lennox could tell him, and then went to see Mary May and her father.

The young wife had grown more collected, but she was dazed rather than reconciled to her fate; her mind had not yet absorbed the full extent of her sorrow.  She talked incessantly and dwelt on trivialities, as people will under a weight of events too large to measure or discuss.

“I am going to write to Tom’s father,” she said.  “This will be an awful blow to him.  He was wrapped up in Tom.  And to think that I was troubling about his letter!  He will never see the sea he loved so much again.  He always hated that verse in the Bible that says there will be no more sea.  I was asleep so near him last night.  Yet I never heard him cry out or anything.”