"All is well. Father leaves for York to-night. He will join mother and me early to-morrow. Expect us about ten o'clock. Am detaining car. Love, MEG."
All is well! What was well? It was a woman's message, which assumed everything and told nothing, except the one amazing fact that Stephen Ogilvey's wife had evidently decided that the period of concealment was ended, and that her husband should now vindicate himself in the eyes of his world.
At any rate, a youth returned to Bellerby with two bicycles and the richer by two sovereigns, so it is tolerably certain that Dalrymple's few words of congratulation were not delayed on the way.
The new tenant smoked and mused in the garden for another hour, until Betty came to summon him to dinner. He was entering the house when he saw the ghost again, a phantom divested now of eeriness, because a round blob of sunshine shone on the wall instead of the white sockets of eyes which lent such a ghoulish aspect to the shadowy face. Then he did a queer thing. Lifting the grandfather's clock, and disregarding the protest of weights and pendulum thumping against its wooden ribs, he placed it exactly where the reflection of the window fell. Instantly, the ghost vanished. The dark mahogany case absorbed the outlines of the figure. The old Spanish wood glowed richly here and there where the lights were strongest, and a disk of gold illumined the dull brass of the clock's face. And that was the end of the Elmdale ghost! Never again would it be seen until someone moved the clock, and Sir Robert Dalrymple vowed that such alteration should not occur in his time.
Luckily, Dr. Scaife came just as Dalrymple was sitting down to a solitary meal, and he was promptly bidden to the feast. Dalrymple showed him Marguérite's telegram, and they discussed it for an hour, or longer, though with no result, for they could only theorize, and, since truth is stranger than fiction, even two such acute minds failed to arrive at the actual solution of the mystery.
Dalrymple went late to bed, and awoke early, to find that the much-maligned British climate had produced another fine day. It was joyous to see the sun shining into his bedroom; it was still more joyous to descend the stairs, and glimpse the blue sky through the Black Prince's visor. A current of pure, sweet-scented air came through the orifice, and seemed to presage a new span of life to the old house; Dalrymple decided, then and there, that when the turmoil had subsided, he would commission the best obtainable artist in stained glass to restore the Black Prince's features in guise befitting his character as a warrior, statesman, and true lover.
A few minutes before ten Tom Bland came with a cartload of plants from a nursery. Smith and the laborers carried the boxes of flowers into the garden, and set them on both sides of the path, so that happy chance contrived that Marguérite should lead her parents to their old home through a blaze of color when the automobile brought them to the gate at ten o'clock.
It is not often that any collection of mortals is privileged to see a ghost in broad daylight, and in the rays of a powerful sun at that, but such was the lot of carrier Bland, gardener Smith, and four gaping yokels of Elmdale, not to mention a quite respectable number of other inhabitants, when Stephen Garth alighted from the car and walked jauntily up the garden to the porch of his own house. To save Mrs. Jackson and Betty from spasms, Dalrymple had warned them previously of Mr. Garth's coming, but the men, and Elmdale generally, were not thus enlightened, and some of them would certainly have bolted had they not seen "the new guv'nor" shaking hands with "the old guv'nor," and had not the latter stopped to greet Begonia Smith with the exceedingly trite remark:
"Well, Smith, I'm not so dead as you thought me!"
"No, sir," said Smith, who did not find his tongue again until the newcomers had gone into the Grange.