"He said," her lover continued, "on my asking him if he had not lost his way, if he had not wandered by accident into private property, that it was possible you might receive other visitors sometimes than the rural inhabitants of this place."
"Oh!" Ariadne exclaimed. "It is impossible! Impossible! He must have been some stranger--some man who had been drinking----"
"He had not been drinking," Geoffrey answered, with quiet emphasis.
"Who, then, could he have been?" she asked now, while he saw that she was still very white; whiter even than before. He felt certain, too, that her hands were trembling. "Could he be lurking here with a view to entering the house at night?" she added.
"Not in that apparel."
"Then seeking one of the maids. Perhaps 'twas that. There are evil men everywhere, men of rank and wealth, who---- Oh!" she exclaimed, "I will summon Mrs. Pottle;" and so speaking, she went towards the bell-pull and rang it.
"Has Mrs. Pottle gone to her room yet?" she asked the servant who answered the summons. "If not, bid her come here." While on receiving an answer to the effect that Mrs. Pottle was in the housekeeper's room, she repeated her order.
Then, a moment or so later, the heavy footfall of Ariadne's old nurse was heard outside the door, and Ariadne, going towards it, went out into the passage to speak with her. It would, however, have been wiser for her to have bidden the woman come in and tell her story before Sir Geoffrey Barry, since, thereby, he would better have believed in his mistress's good faith; for now this action on her part, this going outside to converse with her principal servant, her confidante, seemed a strange one on the girl's part; and, alas! he also heard a word, a few whispered words, that confirmed his worst suspicions. He heard her say, the door not being quite closed to, "Then he has seen him." He heard the words clearly, in spite of their being uttered in that whisper. Heard them, and made up his mind at once as to what his future course must be.
A moment later Ariadne came back, and still she was pale, and, he thought, trembling as she advanced towards him.
"None of the maids," she said, "have left the house this evening to Mrs. Pottle's knowledge. Therefore this man----"