Once more Helen and her father sat at breakfast out on the sheltered balcony of Thurwell Court. Below them the gardens, still slightly coated with the early morning dew, were bathed in the glittering sunshine, and in the distance, and over the tops of the trees in the park, a slight feathery mist was curling upward. The sweet, fresh air, still a little keen, was buoyant with all the joyous exhilaration of spring, and nature, free at last from the saddened grip of winter, was reasserting itself in one glad triumphant chorus. Down in the park the slumberous cawing of the rooks triumphed over the lighter-voiced caroling of innumerable thrushes and blackbirds, and mingled with the faint humming of a few early bees, seemed to fill the air with a sweetly blended strain of glad music. It was one of those mornings typical of its own season, in which the whole atmosphere seems charged with quickening life. Summer with its warm luscious glow, and autumn with its clear calm repose, have their own special charms. But a spring morning, coming after the deep sadness of a hard winter, gains much by the contrast. There is overflowing energy and passionate joy in its newly beating pulses, the warm delight of reawakening life, happy to find the earth so fair a place, which the staider charms of a more developed season altogether lack.
It was in some measure owing to this influence, and also to the fact that she held in her hand a letter from her lover, which her father had handed her without remark, but with a somewhat curious glance, that Helen was feeling very happy that morning. The last year had dealt strangely with her. Tragedy had thrown its startling, gloomy shadow across her life, and had left traces which could never be altogether wiped out. Anxieties of another sort had come, perplexities and strange unhappy doubts, although these last had burned with a fitful, uncertain flame and now seemed stilled for ever. But triumphing over all these was this new-born love, the great deep joy of a woman's life, so vast, so sweet and beautiful, that it transfuses her whole being, and seems to lift her into another world.
And so Helen, leaning back in her chair, with her eyes wandering idly over the pleasant gardens and park below, to where, through a deep gap in the trees, was just visible a faint blue line of sea, was wrapped up very much in her own thoughts, and scarcely doing her duty toward entertaining her father. Indeed, she seemed almost unconscious of his presence until he looked up suddenly from a letter he was reading and asked her a question.
"By the bye, Helen," he said, "I've meant to ask you something every day since you've been home, but I have always forgotten it. Who was that young man who came down here to help Johnson with the auditing, and who went away so suddenly? A protégé of yours, I suppose, as he came here on your recommendation?"
"Yes, I was interested in him," she answered, looking steadily away, and with a faint color in her cheeks. "Why do you ask? Did he not do his work properly?"
"Oh, yes, he did his work very well, I believe," Mr. Thurwell said impatiently. "It was what he did after working hours, and which has just come to my notice, which makes me ask you. It seems he spent the whole of his spare time making covert, but I must say ingenious, inquiries respecting Sir Geoffrey's murder, and I am also given to understand that he paid Falcon's Nest an uninvited visit in the middle of the night. What does it all mean? Was it merely curiosity, or had he any object in it?"
"I think—he had an object," she answered slowly.
"Indeed!" Mr. Thurwell raised his eyebrows and waited for an explanation.
"You remember, papa, that awful scene here when Rachel Kynaston died, and what her last words to me were?"
"Yes, I remember perfectly," Mr. Thurwell answered gravely.