"Oh, there is something ominous in all this, Aubrey," I said.
"Well, so it seems," he answered. "The note purporting to come from me was handed to Emily by a still-room girl here named Charlotte, and was handed to Charlotte by a villager named Weeks. Now, I have had Weeks over from Mins this morning, and Weeks declares that the note was handed him by a dapper young gentleman, probably a foreigner, who met him a little outside Mins, and offered him five shillings for taking it to Goodford House. Weeks left the stranger sitting in the gloaming on the roots of a well-known yew on the road between Mins and Up Hatherley."
"But what design," I said, "could this man have had in enticing Emily from Goodford at that particular time?"
"That is hard to say," answered Langler; "but you observe that I, too, was enticed from Goodford at that time by a promise which was kept by men whom we need not suppose to be scrupulous in the matter of keeping their word. What, then, could have been the motive of actually showing me the face of Robinson, as promised? It could only have been to draw me into the tower to his rescue, and so to my imprisonment. But remember that that imprisonment only lasted three-quarters of an hour at most, and during that short detainment it was that Emily was enticed to Mins. It would seem, then, that with the same motive her absence and mine from Goodford House during that particular three-quarters of an hour was a thing to be desired."
"It wasn't from Goodford that our absence was desired, Aubrey," cried Miss Emily, suddenly looking through the half-opened door, "but from Ritching church: for I was about to go to the church, and so did you mean to go to it from Hallam Castle."
Langler, it seems, had been constrained to tell her something of his adventures at the castle, and he said now, with rather a start: "well, then, it may have been from the church that our absence was desired."
"But for what reason in the world?" I asked.
"Who knows?" he answered. "Still, it does seem now to be so."
"But for what possible reason, do you imagine, Emily?" I asked again.
Miss Emily after a moment's silence answered: "how should I know? But quidquid latet apparebit! we shall know it all some day"—and, saying this, she was gone from us.