"My own good clothes, mother, are somewhere in the North Sea," retorted I. "Top or bottom, sunk or afloat, it's there you'll find them, if you're more anxious about them than me! Do you tell me that Carstairs has never been home?" I went on, turning to Mr. Lindsey, "Then I don't know where he is, nor his yacht either. All I know is that he left me to drown last night, a good twenty miles from land, and that it's only by a special mercy of Providence that I'm here. Wherever he is, yon man's a murderer—I've settled that, Mr. Lindsey!"
The women began to tremble and to exclaim at this news, and to ask one question after another, and Mr. Lindsey shook his head impatiently.
"We can't stand talking our affairs in the station all night," said he. "Let's get to an hotel, my lad—we're all wanting our suppers. You don't seem as if you were in very bad spirits, yourself."
"I'm all right, Mr. Lindsey," I answered cheerfully. "I've been down to Jericho, it's true, and to worse, but I chanced across a good Samaritan or two. And I've looked out a clean and comfortable hotel for you, and we'll go there now."
I led them away to a good hotel that I had noticed in my walks, and while they took their suppers I sat by and told them all my adventure, to the accompaniment of many exclamations from my mother and Maisie. But Mr. Lindsey made none, and I was quick to notice that what most interested him was that I had been to see Mr. Gavin Smeaton.
"But what for did you not come straight home when you were safely on shore again?" asked my mother, who was thinking of the expense I was putting her to. "What's the reason of fetching us all this way when you're alive and well?"
I looked at Mr. Lindsey—knowingly, I suppose.
"Because, mother," I answered her, "I believed yon Carstairs would go back to Berwick and tell that there'd been a sad accident, and I was dead—drowned—and I wanted to let him go on thinking that I was dead—and so I decided to keep away. And if he is alive, it'll be the best thing to let the man still go on thinking I was drowned—as I'll prove to Mr. Lindsey there. If Carstairs is alive, I say, it's the right policy for me to keep out of his sight and our neighbourhood."
"Aye!" agreed Mr. Lindsey, who was a quick hand at taking up things.
"There's something in that, Hugh."
"Well, it's beyond me, all this," observed my mother, "and it all comes of me taking yon Gilverthwaite into the house! But me and Maisie'll away to our beds, and maybe you and Mr. Lindsey'll get more light out of the matter than I can, and glad I'll be when all this mystery's cleared up and we'll be able to live as honest folk should, without all this flying about the country and spending good money."