They went out into the Dutch garden—that garden where John Treverton had walked alone on the morning after his first arrival at Hazlehurst—the garden where he had seen Laura standing under the yew-tree arch, in the glad April sunshine. They passed under the arch to-day, and made the circuit of the orchard, and speculated as to how long it would be before the primroses would brighten the grassy banks, and the wild purple crocuses break through the sod, like imprisoned souls rising from a wintry grave. Never had they been happier together—perhaps never so happy, for John Treverton’s mind was no longer burdened with the secret of an unhappy past. To-day it seemed to both as if there was not a cloud on their horizon. They strolled about orchard and garden until the church clock struck nine, and then John went straight to the hall door, where his handsome bay stood waiting for him, and where Laura’s ponies were rattling their bits, and shaking their pretty little thoroughbred heads, in a general impatience to be doing something, were it only running away with the light basket carriage to which they were harnessed.
‘Oh, there is your tenant,’ said Laura, as she and her husband came round the gravel drive from the adjacent garden, ‘standing at the hall door waiting for you.’
‘Is that he?’ exclaimed Treverton. ‘He looks uncommonly like a Londoner.—Well, my good fellow,’ he began, going up to the man, hunting-crop in hand, ready to mount his horse, ‘what is your business with me? Please make it as short as you can, for I’ve six miles to ride before I begin my day’s work.’
‘I shall be very brief, Mr. Treverton,’ answered the stranger, coming close up to the master of Hazlehurst Manor, and speaking in a low and serious tone, ‘for I want to catch the up train at 11.30, and I must take you with me. I’m a police officer from Scotland Yard, and I am here to arrest you on suspicion of having murdered your wife, known as Mademoiselle Chicot, at Cibber Street, Leicester Square, on the 19th of February, 187—.’
John Treverton turned deadly pale, but he faced the man without flinching.
‘I’ll come with you immediately,’ he said; ‘but you can do me one favour. Don’t let my wife know the nature of the business that takes me to London. I can get it broken to her gently after I am gone.’
‘Don’t you think you’d better tell her yourself?’ suggested the detective, in a friendly tone. ‘She’ll take it better from you than from any one else. I’ve always found it so. Tell her the truth, and let her come to London with us, if she likes.’
‘You are right,’ said Treverton; ‘she’ll be happier near me than eating her heart out down here. You’ve got some one with you, I suppose. You didn’t reckon upon taking me single-handed?’
‘I didn’t reckon upon your making any resistance. You’re too much a gentleman and a man of the world. I’ve no doubt you can clear yourself when you come before a magistrate, and that the business will go no further. It was your being absent from the inquest, you know, that made things look bad against you.’
‘Yes, that was a mistake,’ answered Treverton.