CHAPTER VIII
AT THE SUN-DIAL
The messenger of evil had waited twenty minutes by the side of the sun-dial, when he saw a lady come round the corner from the front of the house, and saunter towards him. Moonlight lay weltering on the white walks of the terrace, on the whiter slabs of stone, on the water of the basin, on the surface of the lake eastward where the lowest of the terraces curved into the parkland that the wavelets lapped on. It weltered, too, on the lady's hair, deftly coiled and twisted into the coiffure of a Greek statue. It shimmered on the powdered blue of her gown that made her coming a little ghostly in that light, on the rows of pearls around her throat, and on the satin gloss of her shoes. She made straight for the dial; and then, all at once, finding some unknown man keeping the tryst, half halted.
He ran out to her, touched his cap, saying "Miss Marsh," handed her the note, touched his cap again, and was going.
"From whom?" she called after him in some astonishment.
"Lady at the Swan, miss"—and he hurried off even more swiftly, for this was a question which he had answered against orders.
She stood a little, looking at the envelope, her breathing labored, an apprehension in her heart. Then, hearing the coming of footsteps which she knew, she broke it open, and ran her eye over the few words.
Bending slightly, with the flood of the moon on the paper, she could easily read the plainly written, message.
... The Mr. Glyn whom you know is no other than the Mr. Rupert Osborne who is in everyone's mouth in connection with the Feldisham Mansions Murder....
Now she laughed with a sudden catch of the breath, gasping "Oh!" with a sharp impatience of all anonymous scandalizers. But as her head rather swam and span, she walked on quickly to the basin, and there found it necessary to sit down on the marble. The stab of pain passed in a few seconds, and again she sprang up and laughed as lightly as one of the little fountains in the basin that tossed its tinted drops to the moonbeams.
Not twenty yards away was Osborne coming to her.