“On my honor,” Crayford answered, “it is the truth.”

“On my honor,” Steventon repeated, “it is the truth.”

She looked at them, carefully considering her next words, before she spoke again.

“You both drew the lot to stay in the huts,” she said, addressing Crayford and Steventon.  “And you are both here.  Richard Wardour drew the lot to stay, and Richard Wardour is not here.  How does his name come to be with Frank’s on the list of the missing?”

The question was a dangerous one to answer.  Steventon left it to Crayford to reply.  Once again he answered evasively.

“It doesn’t follow, my dear,” he said, “that the two men were missing together because their names happen to come together on the list.”

Clara instantly drew the inevitable conclusion from that ill-considered reply.

“Frank is missing from the party of relief,” she said.  “Am I to understand that Wardour is missing from the huts?”

Both Crayford and Steventon hesitated.  Mrs. Crayford cast one indignant look at them, and told the necessary lie, without a moment’s hesitation!

“Yes!” she said.  “Wardour is missing from the huts.”

Quickly as she had spoken, she had still spoken too late.  Clara had noticed the momentary hesitation on the part of the two officers.  She turned to Steventon.

“I trust to your honor,” she said, quietly.  “Am I right, or wrong, in believing that Mrs. Crayford is mistaken?”

She had addressed herself to the right man of the two.  Steventon had no wife present to exercise authority over him.  Steventon, put on his honor, and fairly forced to say something, owned the truth.  Wardour had replaced an officer whom accident had disabled from accompanying the party of relief, and Wardour and Frank were missing together.

Clara looked at Mrs. Crayford.

“You hear?” she said.  “It is you who are mistaken, not I. What you call ‘Accident,’ what I call ‘Fate,’ brought Richard Wardour and Frank together as members of the same Expedition, after all.”  Without waiting for a reply, she again turned to Steventon, and surprised him by changing the painful subject of the conversation of her own accord.

“Have you been in the Highlands of Scotland?” she asked.

“I have never been in the Highlands,” the lieutenant replied.

“Have you ever read, in books about the Highlands, of such a thing as ’The Second Sight’?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in the Second Sight?”

Steventon politely declined to commit himself to a direct reply.

“I don’t know what I might have done, if I had ever been in the Highlands,” he said.  “As it is, I have had no opportunities of giving the subject any serious consideration.”

“I won’t put your credulity to the test,” Clara proceeded.  “I won’t ask you to believe anything more extraordinary than that I had a strange dream in England not very long since.  My dream showed me what you have just acknowledged—­and more than that.  How did the two missing men come to be parted from their companions?  Were they lost by pure accident, or were they deliberately left behind on the march?”