For a little time Sir Oswald hesitated, half-inclined to despise the mysterious warning. All his better feelings prompted him to disregard this nameless correspondent—all his noblest impulses urged him to confide blindly and unquestioningly in the truth of the wife he loved; but jealousy—that dark and fatal passion—triumphed over every generous feeling, and he yielded to the influence of his hidden counsellor.
"No harm can arise from my return to Raynham," he thought. "My friends yonder are enjoying themselves too much to trouble themselves about my absence. If this anonymous correspondent is fooling me, I shall soon discover my mistake."
Having once arrived at this determination, Sir Oswald lost no time in putting it into execution. He ordered his horse, Orestes, and rode away as fast as the animal would carry him.
Arrived at Raynham, he inquired if any one had asked for him, but was told there had not been any visitors at the castle throughout the day.
Again and again Sir Oswald consulted the anonymous letter. It told him to wait, but for what was he to wait? Half ashamed of himself for having yielded to the tempter, restless and uneasy in spirit, he wandered from room to room in the twilight, abandoned to gloomy and miserable thoughts.
The servants lighted the lamps in the many chambers of Raynham, while Sir Oswald paced to and fro—now in the long drawing-room; now in the library; now on the terrace, where the September moon shone broad and full. It was eleven o'clock when the sound of approaching wheels proclaimed the return of the picnic party; and until that hour the baronet had watched and waited without having been rewarded by the smallest discovery of any kind whatever. He felt bitterly ashamed of himself for having been duped by so shallow a trick.
"It is the handiwork of some kind friend; the practical joke of some flippant youngster, who thinks it a delightful piece of humour to play upon the jealousy of a husband of fifty," mused the baronet, as he brooded over his folly. "I wish to heaven I could discover the writer of the epistle. He should find that it is rather a dangerous thing to trifle with a man's feelings."
Sir Oswald went himself to assist at the reception of his guests. He expected to see his wife arrive with the rest. For the moment, he forgot all about his suspicions of the last fortnight. He thought only of the anonymous letter, and the wrong which he had done Honoria in being influenced by its dark hints.
If he could have met his wife at that moment, when every impulse of his heart drew him towards her, all sense of estrangement would have melted away; all his doubts would have vanished before a smile from her. But though Sir Oswald found his wife's barouche the first of the carriages, she was not in it. Lydia Graham told him how "dear Lady Eversleigh" had caused all the party such terrible alarm.
"I suppose she reached home two hours ago," added the young lady. "She had more than an hour's start of us; and with that light vehicle and spirited horse she and Mr. Carrington must have come so rapidly."