“Are we not great fools, Sutherland, to set out on such a chase, with the dream of a sick girl for our only guide?”
“I am sure you don’t think so, else you would not have gone.”
“I think we can afford the small risk to our reputation involved in the chase of this same wild-goose. There is enough of strange testimony about things of the sort to justify us in attending to the hint. Besides, if we neglected it, it would be mortifying to find out some day, perhaps a hundred years after this, that it was a true hint. It is altogether different from giving ourselves up to the pursuit of such things.—But this ought to be the house,” he added, going up to one that had a rather more respectable look than the rest.
He knocked at the door. An elderly woman half opened it and looked at them suspiciously.
“Will you take my card to the foreign gentleman who is lodging with you, and say I am happy to wait upon him?” said Falconer.
She glanced at him again, and turned inwards, hesitating whether to leave the door half-open or not. Falconer stood so close to it, however, that she was afraid to shut it in his face.
“Now, Sutherland, follow me,” whispered Falconer, as soon as the woman had disappeared on the stair.
Hugh followed behind the moving tower of his friend, who strode with long, noiseless strides till he reached the stair. That he took three steps at a time. They went up two flights, and reached the top just as the woman was laying her hand on the lock of the back-room door. She turned and faced them.
“Speak one word,” said Falconer, in a hissing whisper, “and—”
He completed the sentence by an awfully threatening gesture. She drew back in terror, and yielded her place at the door.