“I beg your pardon, sir—”
Clifford stopped and the sergeant overtook him.
“Might I ask, sir, whether it’s to Colonel Bostal’s you’re going?”
“Well, yes.”
“Might I suggest, sir, that you shouldn’t say anything about Miss Claris to the old gentleman and his daughter for the present? The poor lady and gentleman have been in a fearful state of nervousness lately; and if this news was to come on them quite sudden, it might bring on a stroke, perhaps, or something of that sort.”
Clifford hesitated. He had promised Nell to take her message, but, on the other hand, he quite agreed with the sergeant. He temporized.
“Well, I shall be as careful as I can, and I shan’t be in any great hurry.”
“That’ll do, sir,” said the sergeant, as, with a shrewd look, he saluted and went back to the cab.
Clifford walked on, therefore, at no very rapid pace. Indeed, as the cab passed him, with the sergeant on the box beside the driver, he saw Nell’s face at the window, with a little surprise and reproach in her eyes at the slow progress he was making in carrying out her behest.
She, poor girl, sat upright and listened to the sound of the horse’s hoofs and to the wheels upon the road like a person incapable of steady thought. She had known that this blow was coming. She had passed hour after hour of many a weary night in trying to devise means of escape from it. But every plan had ended in failure even before she could put it in practice; for day after day she had found that she was watched by the police, and it had become clear to her that wherever she went she would be shadowed, and that at the time they chose she would find herself in the grip of the police.