I started forward and stared at him. He lighted his pipe with great deliberation.
"Yes," said he nodding his head at me, "the suspicion is unjust." He tossed the splinter into the fire and sat down again.
"And how is little Dorothy Curwen?" he asked, with a lazy, contemptuous smile.
I sprang out of my seat, stung by the contempt rather than the surprise his words were like to arouse in me. And this, I think, he perceived, for he laughed to himself. Whereupon I felt my face flush; and that too he noted, and laughed again.
"Then you knew," I exclaimed, recovering myself—"you knew where I was sheltered!"
"A gentleman riding down Gillerthwaite at three o'clock of the morning is a sufficiently rare a sight to attract attention. I believe that, luckily, the shepherd who saw you only gossiped to a tenant of Blackladies."
I remembered the flock of sheep which I had seen scared up the hillside across the valley. But it was on my return from Keswick that I had been remarked—no later than a day after Rookley had striven to encompass my arrest.
"The news," said I, very slowly, "came to you in a roundabout fashion, and took, I suppose, some time in the coming. I infer, therefore, that it came to your ears after the Earl of Mar had risen in Scotland."
I was leaning upon the mantelpiece, looking down into his face, on which the fire shone with a full light; and just for a moment his face changed, the slightest thing in the world, but enough to assure me that my conjecture was right.
"There are inferences, my good cousin," he said sharply, "which it is not over-prudent for a man so delicately circumstanced as yourself to draw."