For the moment, however, there was nothing to be done except to put Black Brady in his place and pray for Molly’s speedy return.

“Well, Brady,” she said coldly, “I imagine Mr. Kent’s a good enough driver to bring Miss Selwyn back safely.  I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

Brady stared at her out of his sullen eyes.

“You haven’t understood, miss,” he said doggedly.  “Mr. Kent isn’t for bringing Miss Molly back again.  They’d their luggage along wi’ ’em in the car, and Mr. Kent, he stopped at the ‘Cliff’ to have the tank filled up and took a matter of another half-dozen cans o’ petrol with ’im.”

In an instant the whole dreadful significance of the thing leaped into Sara’s mind.  Molly had bolted—­run away with Lester Kent!

It was easy enough now, in the flashlight kindled by Brady’s slow, inexorable summing up of detail, to see the drift of recent happenings, the meaning of each small, disconcerting fact that added a fresh link to the chain of probability.

Molly’s unwonted secretiveness; her strange, uncertain moods; her embarrassment at finding she was expected at Greenacres when she had presumably agreed to meet Lester Kent in Oldhampton; and, last of all, the sudden “cold” which had developed coincidentally with her father’s absence from home and which had secured her freedom from any kind of supervision for the afternoon.  And the opportunity of clinching arrangements—­probably already planned and dependent only on a convenient moment—­had been provided by her errand to the post office to send off her father’s telegram—­it being as easy to send two telegrams as one.

The colour ebbed slowly from Sara’s face as full realization dawned upon her, and she swayed a little where she stood.  With rough kindliness Brady stretched out a grimy hand and steadied her.

“‘Ere, don’t’ take on, miss.  They won’t get very far.  I didn’t, so to speak, fill the petrol tank”—­with a grin—­“and there ain’t more than two o’ they cans I slipped aboard the car as ’olds more’n air.  The rest was empties”—­the grin widened enjoyably—­“which I shoved in well to the back.  Mr. Kent won’t travel eighty miles afore ’e calls a ’alt, I reckon.”

Sara looked at Brady’s cunning, kindly face almost with affection.

“Why did you do that?” she asked swiftly.

“I’ve owed Mr. Lester Kent summat these three years,” he answered complacently.  “And I never forgets to pay back.  I owed you summat, too, Miss Tennant.  I haven’t forgot how you spoke up for me when I was catched poachin’.”

Sara held out her hand to him impulsively, and Brady sheepishly extended his own grubby paw to meet it.

“You’ve more than paid me back, Brady,” she said warmly.  “Thank you.”

Turning away, she hurried up the road, leaving Brady staring alternately at his right hand and at her receding figure.

“She’s rare gentry, is Miss Tennant,” he remarked with conviction, and then slouched off to drink himself blind at “The Jolly Sailorman.”  Black Brady was, after all, only an inexplicable bundle of good and bad impulses—­very much like his betters.