“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said, at last, rather sulkily.  “I was living here.  Is that enough?”

It was not.  And her visitor’s looks told her so.

“I was living here with my grandmother,” she went on hurriedly, as she saw Max glance at the outer door and take a step toward it.  “We’re very poor, and it’s cheaper to live here in a house supposed to be empty than to pay rent.”

“But hardly fair to the landlord,” suggested Max.

“Oh, Granny doesn’t think much of landlords, and, besides, this is part of the property which used to belong to her old master, Mr. Horne—­”

“Ah!” ejaculated Max, with new interest.

The girl looked at him inquiringly.

“What do you know about him?” she asked, with eagerness.

“I have heard of him,” said Max.

But the astute young Londoner was not to be put off so easily.

“You know something of the whole family, perhaps?  Did you know the old gentleman himself?”

“No.”

“Do you know—­his son?”

“Yes.”

“Oh!” She assumed the attitude of an inquisitor immediately.  “Perhaps it was he who sent you here to-day?”

“No.”

She looked long and scrutinizingly in his face, suspicious in her turn.  “Then what made you come?”

Max paused a moment, and then evaded her question very neatly.

“What made me come in here?  Why, I came by the invitation of a young lady, who told me she was afraid to go in alone.”

The girl drew back a little.

“Yes, so I did.  And I am very much obliged to you.  I—­I wanted to ask you to go into that room, the front room, and to fetch some things of mine—­things I have left there.  I daren’t go in by myself.”

Max hesitated.  Beside his old suspicions, a new one had just started into his mind.

“Did you,” he asked, suddenly, “know of some letters which were written to Mr. Dudley Horne?”

A change came over the girl’s face; the expression of deadly terror which he had first seen upon it seemed to be returning gradually.  The blue eyes seemed to grow wider, the lines in her cheek and mouth to become deeper.  After a short pause, during which he noticed that her breath was coming in labored gasps, she whispered: 

“Well, what if I do?  Mind, I don’t say that I do.  But what if I do?”

Her manner had grown fiercely defiant by the time she came to the last word.  Max found the desire to escape becoming even stronger than his curiosity.  The half-guilty look with which his companion had made her last admission caused a new light to flash into his mind.  This “Granny” of whom the girl spoke, and who was alleged to have disappeared, was a woman who had known something of the Horne family.  Either she or this girl might have been the writer of the letter Dudley had received while at The Beeches, which had summoned him so hastily back to town.  What if this old woman had accomplices—­had attempted to rob Dudley?  And what if Dudley, in resisting their attempts, had, in self-defence, struck a blow which had caused the death of one of his assailants?  Dudley would naturally have been silent on the subject of his visit to this questionable haunt, especially to the brother of Doreen.