While we were speaking together I saw the man in black, with the large hat, come out from the house, and stand at some little distance observing us.

Certain suspicions of his errand at Blackwater Park had already crossed my mind.  They were now increased by the gardener’s inability (or unwillingness) to tell me who the man was, and I determined to clear the way before me, if possible, by speaking to him.  The plainest question I could put as a stranger would be to inquire if the house was allowed to be shown to visitors.  I walked up to the man at once, and accosted him in those words.

His look and manner unmistakably betrayed that he knew who I was, and that he wanted to irritate me into quarrelling with him.  His reply was insolent enough to have answered the purpose, if I had been less determined to control myself.  As it was, I met him with the most resolute politeness, apologised for my involuntary intrusion (which he called a “trespass,”) and left the grounds.  It was exactly as I suspected.  The recognition of me when I left Mr. Kyrle’s office had been evidently communicated to Sir Percival Glyde, and the man in black had been sent to the Park in anticipation of my making inquiries at the house or in the neighbourhood.  If I had given him the least chance of lodging any sort of legal complaint against me, the interference of the local magistrate would no doubt have been turned to account as a clog on my proceedings, and a means of separating me from Marian and Laura for some days at least.

I was prepared to be watched on the way from Blackwater Park to the station, exactly as I had been watched in London the day before.  But I could not discover at the time, whether I was really followed on this occasion or not.  The man in black might have had means of tracking me at his disposal of which I was not aware, but I certainly saw nothing of him, in his own person, either on the way to the station, or afterwards on my arrival at the London terminus in the evening.  I reached home on foot, taking the precaution, before I approached our own door, of walking round by the loneliest street in the neighbourhood, and there stopping and looking back more than once over the open space behind me.  I had first learnt to use this stratagem against suspected treachery in the wilds of Central America—­and now I was practising it again, with the same purpose and with even greater caution, in the heart of civilised London!

Nothing had happened to alarm Marian during my absence.  She asked eagerly what success I had met with.  When I told her she could not conceal her surprise at the indifference with which I spoke of the failure of my investigations thus far.

The truth was, that the ill-success of my inquiries had in no sense daunted me.  I had pursued them as a matter of duty, and I had expected nothing from them.  In the state of my mind at that time, it was almost a relief to me to know that the struggle was now narrowed to a trial of strength between myself and Sir Percival Glyde.  The vindictive motive had mingled itself all along with my other and better motives, and I confess it was a satisfaction to me to feel that the surest way, the only way left, of serving Laura’s cause, was to fasten my hold firmly on the villain who had married her.