“I am quite well, thanks, Miss Moyat,” I answered, “but very busy.  The Duke has been giving me some work to do, and he has lent me this cottage, so that I shall be close at hand.  I should have looked you up the first time I came to Braster, but as a matter of fact I have not been there since the night of my lecture.”

She was nervously playing with the fastening of her umbrella, and it seemed to me that her silence was purposeful.  I ventured some remark about the weather, which she interrupted ruthlessly.

“It’s a mile and a half to our house from here,” she said, “not a step farther.  I don’t see why you shouldn’t have made a purpose journey.”

I ignored the reproach in her eyes, as I had every right to do.  But I began to understand the reason of her nervousness and her best clothes, and I prayed for Grooton’s return.

“If I had had an evening to myself,” I said, “I should certainly have paid your father a visit.  But as it happens, the Duke has required me at the house every night while he was here, and he has left me enough work to do to keep me busy night and day till he comes back.”

She looked down upon the floor.

“I had to come and see you,” she said in a low tone.  “Sometimes I can’t sleep for thinking of it.  I feel that I haven’t done right.”

I knew, of course, what she meant.

“I thought we had talked all that out long ago,” I answered, a little wearily.  “You would have been very foolish if you had acted differently.  I don’t see how else you could have acted.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.  “We were always brought up very particular—­especially about telling the truth.”

“Well, you haven’t said anything that wasn’t the truth,” I reminded her.

“Oh, I don’t know.  I haven’t said what I ought to say,” she declared.  “It seems all right when you are with me, and talk about it,” she continued slowly, raising her eyes to mine.  “It’s when I don’t see you for weeks and weeks that it seems to get on my mind, and I get afraid.  I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it even now.”

“Don’t understand what?” I repeated.

She looked around.  Her air of troubled mystery was only half assumed.

“How that man died!” she whispered.

“I can assure you that I did not kill him, if that is what you mean,” I told her coolly.  “The matter is over and done with.  I think that you are very foolish to give it another thought.”

She shuddered.

“Men can forget those things easier,” she said.  “Perhaps he had a wife and children.  Perhaps they are wondering all this time what has become of him.”

“People die away from their homes and families every day, every hour,” I answered.  “It is only morbid to brood over one particular example.”

“Father would never forgive me if he knew,” she murmured, irrelevantly.  “He hates us to do anything underhand.”