“Perhaps,” he answered.

She laughed lightly and turned away.

“You make me very curious,” she said.  “But then, you’ve always done that.”

She went back to her seat by her mother, and he walked on moodily to the house.

Mrs. Dawson said to Ella: 

“How can you talk to that man, my dear?  I think he looks perfectly dreadful—­hardly like a human being.”

“I was just telling him he ought to shave himself,” said Ella.  “I told him I should like to know what he was really like.”

“I shall ask father,” said Mrs. Dawson sternly, “to make it a condition of his employment here.”

CHAPTER XVII

A DECLARATION

Dunn knew very well that he ought to give immediate information to the authorities of what had happened.

But he did not.  He told himself that nothing could help poor John Clive, and that any precipitate action on his part might still fatally compromise his plans, which were now so near completion.

But his real reason was that he knew that if he came forward he would be very closely questioned, and sooner or later forced to tell the things he knew so terribly involving Ella.

And he knew that to surrender her to the police and proclaim her to the world as guilty of such things were tasks beyond his strength; though, to himself, with a touch of wildness in his thoughts, he said that no proved and certain guilt should go unpunished even though his own hand—­ It was a train of ideas he did not pursue.

“Charley Wright first and now John Clive,” he said to himself.  “But the end is not yet.”

Again he would not let his thoughts go on but checked them abruptly.

In this dark and troubled mood he went out to busy himself with the garden, and all the time he worked he watched with a sort of vertigo of horror where Ella sat in the sunshine by her mother’s side, her white hands moving nimbly to and fro upon her needlework.

It was not long, however, before the tragedy of the wood was discovered, for Clive had been seen to go in that direction, and when he did not return a search was made that was soon successful.

The news was brought to Bittermeads towards evening by a tradesman’s boy, who came up from the village to bring something that had been ordered from there.

“Have you heard?” he said to Dunn excitedly.  “Mr. Clive’s been shot dead by poachers.”

“Oh—­by poachers?” repeated Dunn.

“Yes, poachers,” the boy answered, and went on excitedly to tell his tale with many, and generally very inaccurate, details.

But that the crime had been discovered and instantly set down to poachers was at least certain, and Dunn realized at once that the adoption of this simple and apparently plausible theory would put an end to all really careful investigation of the circumstances and make the discovery of the truth highly improbable.