"I am sorry to see you looking ill. Where shall I find John?" asked Mr. Bulstrode.
Aurora's pale face flushed suddenly.
"I—I—don't know," she stammered. "He is not in the house; he has gone out—to the stables—or to the farm, I think. I'll send for him."
"No, no," Talbot said, intercepting her hand on its way to the bell. "I'll go and look for him. Lucy will be glad of a chat with you, I dare say, Aurora, and will not be sorry to get rid of me."
Lucy, with her arm about her cousin's waist, assented to this arrangement. She was grieved to see the change in Aurora's looks, the unnatural constraint of her manner.
Mr. Bulstrode walked away, hugging himself upon having done a very wise thing.
"Lucy is a great deal more likely to find out what is the matter than I am," he thought. "There is a sort of freemasonry between women, an electric affinity, which a man's presence always destroys. How deathly pale Aurora looks! Can it be possible that the trouble I expected has come so soon?"
He went to the stables, but not so much to look for John Mellish as in the hope of finding somebody intelligent enough to furnish him with a better account of the murder than any he had yet heard.
"Some one else, as well as Aurora, must have had a reason for wishing to get rid of this man," he thought. "There must have been some motive: revenge,—gain,—something which no one has yet fathomed."
He went into the stable-yard; but he had no opportunity of making his investigation, for John Mellish was standing in a listless attitude before a small forge, watching the shoeing of one of his horses. The young squire looked up with a start as he recognized Talbot, and gave him his hand, with a few straggling words of welcome. Even in that moment Mr. Bulstrode saw that there was perhaps a greater change in John's appearance than in that of Aurora. The Yorkshireman's blue eyes had lost their brightness, his step its elasticity; his face seemed sunken and haggard, and he evidently avoided meeting Talbot's eye. He lounged listlessly away from the forge, walking at his guest's side in the direction of the stable-gates; but he had the air of a man who neither knows nor cares whither he is going.