“No. Mr. Langley, there isn’t,” she acknowledged, and asked him if he was going thither. And when he said that he was she asked if she might go along. He acquiesced. After she had spoken to Miss Penny, Mr. Langley handed her into the carriage and they drove to the lane where the minister gave the horse in charge to someone standing about. Going straight to the shop, they found the three men Mr. Langley had seen and the constable.
The latter pounded on the door preliminary to breaking it in. He waited a few seconds. The echoes of the thundering knocks had hardly died away when the door opened and Alice Lorraine appeared before the five men and her mother.
CHAPTER XXI
PUSHING by Alice Lorraine, deaf to her entreaties, the constable and two of the men made their way into the shop and after an hasty glance about the lower room hastened upstairs. Mr. Langley, after a brief word to Mrs. Lorraine, followed. And despite his haste and excitement and perturbation, he noticed the homelike appearance of the place he recollected as a littered work shop.
But of the upper chamber he noted no detail. As his head rose above the railing of the stair, he saw the men start back from the further end of the place. Peering into the shadows, he saw the figure of a man stretched upon an old couch. Approaching, he saw that he was burning with fever and unconscious. The man, who was very tall, was not at all the tramp in appearance, though he seemed to have slept in his clothes. He was well dressed and a superficial view pronounced him of refined presence. He was like a skeleton, however, and his purple face cadaverous to the extreme.
Mr. Langley asked one of the men to go for the doctor, sending Mrs. Lorraine up as he went. The constable said he would wait below. The other man took a chair in the further end of the room as Mrs. Lorraine joined Mr. Langley by the couch.
“Do you know this man?” he asked.
“I never saw him in my life,” she declared, and going to the stairs, summoned Alice. The girl appeared, white as chalk.
“Alice, do you know this man,” demanded the mother sternly.
“I know him, certainly!” cried the girl defiantly. “He is—he is a gentleman. He has done no one any harm. He came to Farleigh to look for someone he knew once, and I told him he might stay here.”