“See this?”

They hastened towards her and bent down to examine the spot she indicated.

“What do you find there?” cried Mr. Sutherland, whose eyesight was not good.

“Blood,” responded the coroner, plucking up a blade of grass and surveying it closely.

“Blood,” echoed Miss Page, with so suggestive a glance that Mr. Sutherland stared at her in amazement, not understanding his own emotion.

“How were you able to discern a stain so nearly imperceptible?” asked the coroner.

“Imperceptible?  It is the only thing I see in the whole yard,” she retorted, and with a slight bow, which was not without its element of mockery, she turned toward the gate.

“A most unaccountable girl,” commented the doctor.  “But she is right about these stains.  Abel,” he called to the man at the gate, “bring a box or barrel here and cover up this spot.  I don’t want it disturbed by trampling feet.”

Abel started to obey, just as the young girl laid her hand on the gate to open it.

“Won’t you help me?” she asked.  “The crowd is so great they won’t let me through.”

“Won’t they?” The words came from without.  “Just slip out as I slip in, and you’ll find a place made for you.”

Not recognising the voice, she hesitated for a moment, but seeing the gate swaying, she pushed against it just as a young man stepped through the gap.  Necessarily they came face to face.

“Ah, it’s you,” he muttered, giving her a sharp glance.

“I do not know you,” she haughtily declared, and slipped by him with such dexterity she was out of the gate before he could respond.

But he only snapped his finger and thumb mockingly at her, and smiled knowingly at Abel, who had lingered to watch the end of this encounter.

“Supple as a willow twig, eh?” he laughed.  “Well, I have made whistles out of willows before now, and hallo! where did you get that?”

He was pointing to a rare flower that hung limp and faded from Abel’s buttonhole.

“This?  Oh, I found it in the house yonder.  It was lying on the floor of the inner room, almost under Batsy’s skirts.  Curious sort of flower.  I wonder where she got it?”

The intruder betrayed at once an unaccountable emotion.  There was a strange glitter in his light green eyes that made Abel shift rather uneasily on his feet.  “Was that before this pretty minx you have just let out came in here with Mr. Sutherland?”

“O yes; before anyone had started for the hill at all.  Why, what has this young lady got to do with a flower dropped by Batsy?”

“She?  Nothing.  Only—­and I have never given you bad advice, Abel—­ don’t let that thing hang any longer from your buttonhole.  Put it into an envelope and keep it, and if you don’t hear from me again in regard to it, write me out a fool and forget we were ever chums when little shavers.”

The man called Abel smiled, took out the flower, and went to cover up the grass as Dr. Talbot had requested.  The stranger took his place at the gate, toward which the coroner and Mr. Sutherland were now advancing, with an air that showed his great anxiety to speak with them.  He was the musician whom we saw secretly entering the last-mentioned gentleman’s house after the departure of the servants.