"And Sir Jekyl?"
"About the same hour."
"And Lady Jane is called, I suppose, a little before that hour?"
"Yes, about a quarter past eight, Monsieur. Will Monsieur please to desire his cup of coffee?"
"Yes, everything—quickly—I wish to dress; and what's this? a letter."
It was from Guy Deverell, as Varbarriere saw at a glance, and not through the post.
"My nephew hasn't come?" sternly demanded Varbarriere, with a kind of start, on reading the signature, which he did before reading the letter.
"No, Monsieur, a young man has conveyed it from Slowton."
Whereupon Varbarriere, with a striped silk nightcap of many colours pending over his corrugated forehead, read the letter through the divided bed-curtains.
His nephew, it appeared, had arrested his course at Birmingham, and turned about, and reached Slowton again about the hour at which M. Varbarriere had met old Lennox in the grounds of Marlowe.