He asked Lady Sue to mount behind him, but this she refused to do. So he put his nag back to foot space, and thus the much-diminished little party slowly walked back to Acol Court.
CHAPTER XLI
THEIR NAME
What had prompted Editha de Chavasse to return thus alone to the Quakeress's cottage, she herself could not exactly have told.
It must have been a passionate and irresistible desire to heap certainty upon a tangle of horrible surmises.
With Adam Lambert lying dead—obviously murdered—and in the clothes affected by de Chavasse when masquerading as the French hero, there could be only one conclusion. But this to Editha—who throughout had given a helping hand in the management of the monstrous comedy—was so awful a solution of the puzzle that she could not but recoil from it, and strive to deny it while she had one sane thought left in her madly whirling brain.
But though she fought against the conclusion with all her might, she did not succeed in driving it from her thoughts: and through it all there was a vein of uncertainty, that slender thread of hope that after all she might be the prey of some awful delusion, which a word from someone who really knew would anon easily dissipate.
Someone who really knew? Nay! that someone could only be Marmaduke, and of him she dared not ask questions.
Mayhap that on the other hand the old woman and Richard Lambert knew more than they had cared to say. Sue was indeed deeply absorbed in thoughts, walking with head bent and eyes fixed on the ground like a somnambulist. Editha, moved by unreasoning instinct, determined to see the Quakeress again, also the man who now lay dead, hoping that from him mayhap she might glean the real solution of that mystery which sooner or later would undoubtedly drive her mad.