Trembling and horror-struck, Rhoda was unable to decide whether she ought to go upstairs and call for help, when, panting and drawing deep breaths the figure stole out of the room again, shutting the door softly.
The man was in such deep darkness and Rhoda was so far entrenched in her corner that she could see but little of him, and that little very dimly, until he was half-way up the stairs, when, dragging his way up by the stair-rails, he laid his hand for a moment upon that spot of the banisters where a single ray of moonlight fell upon them from between the heavy velvet curtains that draped the staircase window.
And Rhoda saw, with a shudder, that across the hand was the red line of a cut which was still bleeding.
Before she could even be sure whether the figure was that of Sir Robert, as she believed, it had disappeared.
Confused, trembling, wondering what it was that had happened, Rhoda opened the front-door and slipped out, closing it softly behind her.
She thought that she must have made enough noise for the shutting of the door to have attracted attention, and she hoped, as she went slowly down the narrow slip of garden which was all that lay between the front of the house and the road, that the baronet would come out after her, waylay her, and perhaps insist upon her return.
But nobody came out, nobody followed her; and so, mystified, sick with terror, and asking herself as she went whether she ought to have come out without an effort to find out what had happened, she went down the road towards the harbour.
She put up, for the rest of the night, at an hotel where she had stayed before with her parents, and where travellers from off the boats came at all times of the night, so that her late arrival attracted no particular attention.
On the following morning she took the first train to Deal, and reached the lodgings where her parents were in such a condition of exhaustion that she was promptly put to bed. She insisted, however, upon being allowed to tell her mother the singular circumstances that had occurred at the moment of her departure from Mill-house, and begged that they would let her know at once if it should come to her parents’ ears that anything serious had happened that night at Sir Robert’s residence.
For four days she was kept in bed, and assured that nothing had happened as far as any one knew.