Sir Joseph partially recovered his senses while they were taking him up the steep and narrow stairs.  Carefully as they carried the patient, the motion wrung a groan from him before they reached the top.  The bedroom corridor, in the rambling, irregularly built house rose and fell on different levels.  At the door of the first bedchamber the doctor asked a little anxiously if that was the room.  No; there were three more stairs to go down, and a corner to turn, before they could reach it.  The first room was Natalie’s.  She instantly offered it for her father’s use.  The doctor (seeing that it was the airiest as well as the nearest room) accepted the proposal.  Sir Joseph had been laid comfortably in his daughter’s bed; the doctor had just left them, with renewed assurances that they need feel no anxiety, when they heard a heavy step below stairs.  Turlington had re-entered the house.

(He had been looking, as they had supposed, for the ruffian who had attacked Sir Joseph; with a motive, however, for the search at which it was impossible for other persons to guess.  His own safety was now bound up in the safety of Thomas Wildfang.  As soon as he was out of sight in the darkness, he made straight for the malt-house.  The change of clothes was there untouched; not a trace of his accomplice was to be seen.  Where else to look for him it was impossible to tell.  Turlington had no alternative but to go back to the house, and ascertain if suspicion had been aroused in his absence.)

He had only to ascend the stairs, and to see, through the open door, that Sir Joseph had been placed in his daughter’s room.

“What does this mean?” he asked, roughly.

Before it was possible to answer him the footman appeared with a message.  The doctor had come back to the door to say that he would take on himself the necessary duty of informing the constable of what had happened, on his return to the village.  Turlington started and changed color.  If Wildfang was found by others, and questioned in his employer’s absence, serious consequences might follow.  “The constable is my business,” said Turlington, hurriedly descending the stairs; “I’ll go with the doctor.”  They heard him open the door below, then close it again (as if some sudden thought had struck him), and call to the footman.  The house was badly provided with servants’ bedrooms.  The women-servants only slept indoors.  The footman occupied a room over the stables.  Natalie and her aunt heard Turlington dismiss the man for the night, an hour earlier than usual at least.  His next proceeding was stranger still.  Looking cautiously over the stairs, Natalie saw him lock all the doors on the ground-floor and take out the keys.  When he went away, she heard him lock the front door behind him.  Incredible as it seemed, there could be no doubt of the fact—­the inmates of the house were imprisoned till he came back.  What did it mean?

(It meant that Turlington’s vengeance still remained to be wreaked on the woman who had deceived him.  It meant that Sir Joseph’s life still stood between the man who had compassed his death and the money which the man was resolved to have.  It meant that Richard Turlington was driven to bay, and that the horror and the peril of the night were not at an end yet.)