Manston returned to the bedroom close upon her heels, and entered it—­again without a light.  Standing motionless for an instant to assure himself that she still slept, he went to the drawer in which their ready-money was kept, and removed the casket that contained it.  Anne’s ear distinctly caught the rustle of notes, and the chink of the gold as he handled it.  Some he placed in his pocket, some he returned to its place.  He stood thinking, as it were weighing a possibility.  While lingering thus, he noticed the reflected image of his own face in the glass—­pale and spectre-like in its indistinctness.  The sight seemed to be the feather which turned the balance of indecision:  he drew a heavy breath, retired from the room, and passed downstairs.  She heard him unbar the back-door, and go out into the yard.

Feeling safe in a conclusion that he did not intend to return to the bedroom again, she arose, and hastily dressed herself.  On going to the door of the apartment she found that he had locked it behind him.  ‘A precaution—­it can be no more,’ she muttered.  Yet she was all the more perplexed and excited on this account.  Had he been going to leave home immediately, he would scarcely have taken the trouble to lock her in, holding the belief that she was in a drugged sleep.  The lock shot into a mortice, so that there was no possibility of her pushing back the bolt.  How should she follow him?  Easily.  An inner closet opened from the bedroom:  it was large, and had some time heretofore been used as a dressing or bath room, but had been found inconvenient from having no other outlet to the landing.  The window of this little room looked out upon the roof of the porch, which was flat and covered with lead.  Anne took a pillow from the bed, gently opened the casement of the inner room and stepped forth on the flat.  There, leaning over the edge of the small parapet that ornamented the porch, she dropped the pillow upon the gravel path, and let herself down over the parapet by her hands till her toes swung about two feet from the ground.  From this position she adroitly alighted upon the pillow, and stood in the path.

Since she had come indoors from her walk in the early part of the evening the moon had risen.  But the thick clouds overspreading the whole landscape rendered the dim light pervasive and grey:  it appeared as an attribute of the air.  Anne crept round to the back of the house, listening intently.  The steward had had at least ten minutes’ start of her.  She had waited here whilst one might count fifty, when she heard a movement in the outhouse—­a fragment once attached to the main building.  This outhouse was partitioned into an outer and an inner room, which had been a kitchen and a scullery before the connecting erections were pulled down, but they were now used respectively as a brewhouse and workshop, the only means of access to the latter being through the brewhouse.  The outer door of this first apartment was usually fastened by a padlock on the exterior.  It was now closed, but not fastened.  Manston was evidently in the outhouse.