The Spy in Black

by J. Storer Clouston

When I looked up I caught a look in her eye that I could make nothing of at all. It was beyond question very kind, yet there seemed to be something sorrowful too. It made her look so ravishing that I think I would have taken her in my arms there and then, had not Tiel returned at that moment.

"Well," asked Eileen, "what did you tell Mr Craigie?"

"I said that you were secretly married to Mr Wilson, whose parents would cut him off without a penny if they suspected the entanglement, and this was the only plan by which you could spend a few days together. Of course I swore him to secrecy."

For a moment I hesitated whether to resent this liberty, or to feel a little pleased, or to be amused. Eileen laughed gaily, and so I laughed too. And that was the end (so far) of my afternoon adventure.

III.

THURSDAY NIGHT.

I went up to my room early in the evening. Eileen had been very silent, and about nine o'clock she bade us good-night and left us. To sit alone with Tiel, feeling as I did and yet bound by a promise not to upbraid him, was intolerable, and so I left the parlour a few minutes after she did. As I went down the passage to the back, my way lit only by the candle I was carrying, I was struck with a sound I had heard in that house before, only never so loudly. It was the droning of the wind through the crevices of some door, and the whining melancholy note in the stillness of that house of divided plotters and confidences withheld, did nothing to raise my spirits.

When I reached my room I realised what had caused the droning. The wind had changed to a new quarter, and as another consequence my chimney was smoking badly and the room was filled with a pungent blue cloud. It is curious how events arise as consequences of trifling and utterly different circumstances. I tried opening my door and then my window, but still the fire smoked and the cloud refused to disperse. Then I had an inspiration. I have mentioned a large cupboard. It was so large as almost to be a minute room, and I remembered that it had a skylight in its sloping roof. I opened this, and as the room at once began to clear, I left it open.

And then I paced the floor and smoked and thought. What was to be made of these very disquieting events? Clearly Tiel was either a much less capable and clever man than he was reputed—a bit of a fraud in fact—or else he was carrying his fondness for mystery and for suddenly springing brilliant surprises, like conjuring tricks, upon people, to the most extreme lengths. If he were really carrying out a cunning deliberate policy in not preaching last Sunday, good and well, but it was intolerable that he should have deceived me about it. It seemed quite a feasible theory to suppose that he had got out of conducting the service on some excuse in order that he might be asked to stay longer and preach next Sunday instead. But then he had deliberately told me he had preached, and that the people had been so pleased that they had invited him to preach again. It sounded like a schoolboy's boastfulness!