"I am ready now," he quietly informed us. "Mr. Outhwaite, I can trust you; and if Hope—" He stopped and looked the entreaty he dared not utter.
"I will tell her the whole story just as it has fallen from your lips. You wish me to?"
He signified his assent, but still looked wistful.
"When she has heard the true cause of the division which has taken place between you and other members of your family, she will act as her own kind heart will prompt her," I added.
He would have pressed my hand, but remembering his position as a prisoner, refrained.
"Let us go," he now said, in natural recoil from the noises which just then burst in renewed outcry from every quarter of the house.
Mr. Gryce gave a faint whistle. It was answered in the same guarded manner from below. At which the old detective turned to me with a few final directions, after which, with a promise to leave me well guarded, he made a gesture which Mr. Gillespie could not fail to understand. They began to descend. When Mr. Gillespie was half-way down, he gave one backward look at the door swaying between him and what he had loved best on earth; then he passed on, and I was left standing on that dingy landing, alone.
There was some clamour and no little jeering in the rooms below as the detectives passed through them with their well-dressed prisoner; but these tokens of class animosity speedily weakened to a sullen growl, amidst which I thought I heard the rattling of departing wheels.
With a heart as heavy as the silence which now filled the house, I turned and went back into that room.
It was filled with moonlight. The candle from which the winding-sheet had long ago melted and run upon the table, had flickered out, but its fitful flame was not missed. The clouds which had seemed so impenetrable a short time before, had thinned out and parted till they flecked, rather than covered, the white disk of the moon, now revealed for the first time in days.