"I wonder," I thought aloud, "if she could have meant to suggest some friendly compromise? Maybe she'd heard a lot from her father about the marvellous old place. Grandmother said, I remember, that Cecil Scarlett was so poor he lived in Australia like a labourer, though his father died here, while he was there, and he inherited the title. Think what the description of Dun Moat would be like to a girl brought up in the bush! And maybe her mother was of the lower classes, as no one knew about the marriage. What if the daughter came into money from sheep or mines, or something, and meant to propose living at Dun Moat with her uncle's family? I can see her, arriving en surprise, full of enthusiasm and loving-kindness, which wouldn't 'cut ice' with Madame Defarge!"
"Not much!" agreed Jim, grimly. "She'd calmly begin knitting the shroud!"
So we talked on, thrashing out one theory after another, but sure in any case that there was a prisoner at Dun Moat. Jim made me quite proud by applauding my plot, and didn't need to be asked before offering to help carry it out. Indeed, as my "sole living relative" (he put it that way), he would now take the whole responsibility upon himself. The police were not to be called in except as a last resort: and that night or next day, according to the turn of the game, the trump card I'd pulled out of the pack should be played for all it was worth!
CHAPTER IX
THE RAT TRAP
Did you ever see a wily gray rat caught in a trap? Or, still more thrilling, a pair of wily gray rats?
This is what I saw that same night when I'd motored back from Courtenaye Abbey to Dawley St. Ann.
But let me begin with what happened first.
Jim wished to go with me, to be on hand in case of trouble. But the reason why I'd hoped to find him at the Abbey was because we have a secret room there which everyone knows (including tourists at a shilling a head), and at least one more of which no outsiders have been told. The latter might come in handy, and I begged Jim to "stand by," pending developments.