Mr. Tuke sat in his dining-hall, swollen and glowering as a ruffled tom-cat. He had not struck in haste to repent at leisure; but it is true that he was woefully exercised in his mind as to what to do next. The logical sequence of his action, he felt, should be incarceration for his prisoner in Winton Gaol on the strength of an information—his own—laid against him. Certainly. And how should the information be worded? It was at this point he always fell to gnawing his lips, and drumming on the table with his fingers, and glaring at a robin on the window-sill, as if he knew it could furnish the solution if it would only leave off hopping and twittering.
Now, he had done rightly and as he had engaged himself to act. He had bided his time, and struck on the first evidence of guilt. Still, now he came to think it over—with what impartiality he could command—he could not but acknowledge that the proofs might show extremely negative to an unbiased intelligence. For what did they amount to? Crime? No. But the invitation to it.
What would be the value of his solitary pièce de conviction in the eye of the law? A moral inference was too short a rope to hang a man with. He could say only his servant was tempted; but what was to show that it was to his undoing? Moreover, he had not even taken the precaution to retain possession of the condemning stone.
On this last thought, he sprang up and went hastily out into the hall. To and fro he searched; but without result. The flint, with its scrawled hieroglyphics, was gone. He unbolted and threw open the front door, half-expecting to find Darda huddled, accusatory, under the porch, whither he had pushed her near an hour ago. She was not there, nor anywhere about was the stone; and he returned to his lonely hall and his complex self-communings.
He was deep in them, when he heard the sound of hoofs on the gravel outside, and, a moment later, the voice of his friend of “Chatters” pronouncing his name.
“Here!” he cried; and grasped Sir David warmly by the hand as the latter pushed open the room door and entered.
He was unfeignedly glad to see him; the more so, perhaps, from a certain uneasy memory of his somewhat churlish attitude towards the little man when last they had met.
“What brings you over?” he cried gladly. “But you are welcome for any reason.”
“Darda fetched me,” said Sir David, with a little tremor in his voice.
“The devil she did!”