"Does he know who killed Mr. Edermont?"
"He does--and you know also."
"No, no; I--I do not!" gasped Mrs. Tice, shrinking back; "my knowledge has nothing to do with the matter."
"Has your knowledge anything to do with my father?"
Mrs. Tice gasped again, and sank into a chair. For a moment she closed her eyes, and when she opened them again Dora was gone. The housekeeper wiped her face.
"Who can have told her about her father?" she meditated. "If she gets to know about him, there will be trouble."
Then she drank a glass of water, and put away her work. But her thoughts wandered.
"What has come to her?" she said to herself again, as she made all safe for the night. "There is a worried look on her face, an anxious expression in her eyes. And why did she go up to London? Can she have learnt anything about the past? No, no. Mr. Allen knows it, Mr. Joad knows it, and myself. None of the three will tell her. Still, that question about her father! It is very, very strange."
In the meantime Dora was leaning out of her bedroom window, looking into the soft darkness of the night. Overhead the sky was fleecy with clouds, between the rifts of which twinkled the cold stars, and below, between the tree-tops and dry grass, hovered the thick gloom of night. She could see nothing in the shadows; all was as indistinct, as unknown, as strange, as this mystery which was torturing her life.
She had gone seeking, and she had learnt much: that her mother lived, and her father; that the latter had been the incarnation of the deadly fear which had haunted Dargill, alias Edermont, throughout his long life. No wonder he had changed his name, had hidden himself in the Red House, had prayed for deliverance from murder and sudden death, when a man of violent passions had hunted him hot-footed through the world. Dora remembered what a despicable coward the dead man had been, and no longer marvelled at his fears; but what she did wonder at was the change that had come over Edermont after Pallant's visit. Then he had declared that the shadow was lifted from his life; that he could henceforth mix with his fellow-men, and dwell in safety. Such joy could only mean that his enemy was dead. Yet Edermont was dead also, of the very death he feared.