Siddle stood up.
“You ain’t goin’, Mr. Siddle?” went on the butcher. “It’s ’ardly ’arf past nine.”
“I have some accounts to get out. It’s near the half year, you know,” and Siddle vanished unobtrusively.
Hobbs shook his head, and gazed at Elkin as though the latter was a refractory bullock.
“Siddle’s a fair-minded chap,” he said. “He can’t stand ’earin’ any of us ’angin’ a man without a fair trial.”
Ingerman had marked the chemist for more subtle treatment when an opportunity arose, or could be made. At present, he was not sorry such a restraining influence was removed. The next half hour should prove a golden one if well utilized. He was right. Before the inn was cleared, what between Elkin’s savage comments and the other men’s thinly-veiled allusions, he knew all that Steynholme could tell with regard to Grant and Doris Martin.
Grant’s first thought next morning was of the girl who had been thrust so prominently into his life by the death of another woman. That was, perhaps, the strangest outcome of the tragedy. Doris was easily the prettiest and most intelligent girl in the village, a rare combination in itself, even among young ladies of much higher social position than a postmaster’s daughter. But her father was a self-educated man, whose life had been given to books, whose only hobby was the culture and study of bees. He had often refused promotion, solely because his duties at Steynholme were light, and permitted of many free hours. In his only child he found a quick pupil and a sympathetic helper. Of her own accord she took to poetry and music. In effect, had Doris Martin attended the best of boarding-schools and training colleges, she would have received a smattering of French and a fair knowledge of the piano or violin, whereas, after more humble tuition, it might fairly be said of her that few girls of her age had read so many books and assimilated their contents so thoroughly. From her mother she inherited her good looks and a small yearly income, just sufficient to maintain a better wardrobe than her father’s salary would permit.
Grant, newly settled in Steynholme, found the postmaster and his daughter intellectually on a par with himself, and this claim could certainly not be made on behalf of the local “society” element. The three became excellent friends. Naturally, the young people spent a good deal of time together. But there had been no love-making—not a hint or whisper of it!
And now, by cruel chance, their names were linked by scandal in its most menacing form, since there was no gainsaying the fact that Doris’s star-gazing on that fatal Monday night was indissolubly bound up with the death of Adelaide Melhuish.
For the first time, then, the notion peeped up in Grant’s mind that the whirligig of existence might see Doris his wife. But the conceit resembled the Gorgon’s teeth, which, when sown in the ground, sprang forth as armed men. The very accident which revealed a not unpleasing possibility had established a grave obstacle in the way of its ultimate realization. Already there was a cloud between him and the Martins, father and daughter. To what a tempest might not that cloud develop when the questionings and innuendoes of the inquest established an aura of suspicion and intrigue around a perfectly innocent meeting in the garden of The Hollies!