After that events moved very quickly. When a few minutes later Mr. Anstruther returned in a cab, he was met on the doorstep by most of the members of the family, who crowded round him and shouted out the good news that his granddaughter was found.
"Margaret at Wrexley Park!" he said, when he had alighted from the cab and could make his voice heard. "How exceedingly strange that she should have found her way there!"
"Well, I don't know," said Geoffrey. "If one shot by Windy Gap, which is what she must have done in the darkness, she had only to keep on and on and she would be bound to strike Wrexley next. You see, sir, it lies right under the lee of the downs."
"Quite so, quite so," said Mr. Anstruther patiently. "But when I commented on the singularity of the circumstance which had directed the steps of my granddaughter towards Wrexley, I was not referring so much to the relative geographical positions of Windy Gap and Wrexley, with which indeed I am unacquainted, but——"
"You were thinking how funny it was that she should have fetched up at her own aunt's house in the end," broke in Maud, for which unceremonious interruption she received a glance of reproof from Mr. Anstruther, and scant thanks afterwards from the other members of the family who had been hanging delightedly on Mr. Anstruther's careful phraseology, and who had all wanted to hear him finish his remark for himself.
Then Mr. Anstruther went up to Eleanor, who was standing a little apart from all the others, and after subjecting her to a moment's severe scrutiny, spoke abruptly:—
"I am glad your anxiety is at an end. I think you have been sufficiently punished."
Eleanor smiled a little tremulously. The punishment had indeed been sharp, although it had been nothing but the voice of her own conscience.
"Can you forgive me?" she said.
"Yes," he answered, in his cold, precise accents, "I can now. Though I make no secret of the fact that, had my just resentment against you not been softened by the anxiety we have shared in common, my reply to that question would have been in the negative."