She raised her face suddenly and her eyes met his.  There was a haunted look in them that made him draw closer, his own face anxious.

“What is it, dear?” he said in a low, worried tone.

“Only—­Dacre Wynne.  Always Dacre Wynne these days,” she replied unsteadily.  “Do you know, Nigel, I am a silly girl, I know, but somehow I dare not think of marriage with you until—­everything is finally cleared up, and his death or disappearance, or whatever the dreadful affair was, discovered.  I feel in some inexplicable way responsible.  It is as if his spirit were standing between us and our happiness.  Tell me I am foolish, please.”

“You are more than foolish,” said Nigel obediently, and laughed carelessly to show her how he treated the thing.  But in his heart he knew her feelings, knew them and fully understood.  It was exactly as he had felt about it also.  The bond that bound Dacre Wynne’s life to his had not yet been snapped, the mystery of his disappearance seemed only to strengthen it.  He wondered dully when he would ever feel free again, and then laughed inwardly at himself for making a farce of the whole thing, for building a mountain out of a stupid little molehill.  And ’Toinette was helping him.  They were both unutterably foolish.  Anyhow, Cleek was coming soon to clear matters up.  He wished with all his heart that he might tell ’Toinette, and thus relieve the tension of her mind, but he had given his word to Cleek, and with a man of his type his word was sacred.

So he kissed her good-bye and laughed, and went back to Merriton Towers to prepare for their coming.  But the cloud had dropped across his horizon again, and the sun was once more obscured.  There was no smile upon his lips as he clanged the great front door to behind him.

CHAPTER XI

THE SECRET OF THE FLAMES

Fetchworth, as everybody knows, lies in that part of the Fen district of Lincolnshire that borders on the coast, and in the curve of its motherlike arm Saltfleet Bay, a tiny shipping centre with miniature harbour, drowses its days in pleasant idleness.

And so it was that upon the morning of Cleek’s and Mr. Narkom’s arrival at Merriton Towers.  They came disguised as two idlers interested in the surrounding country, after having satiated themselves at the fountain of London’s gaieties, and bore the pseudonyms of “George Headland” and “Mr. Gregory Lake” respectively.  Cleek himself was primed, so to speak, on every point of the landscape.  He knew all about Fetchworth that there was to know—­saving the secret of the Frozen Flames, and that he was expected to know very soon—­and the traffic of Saltfleet Bay and its tiny harbour was an open book to him.

Even Withersby Hall and its environs had had the same close intensive study, and everything that was to be learnt from guide-books, tourists’ enquiry offices and the like, was hidden away in the innermost recesses of his remarkable brain.