Early in October, Laura, Oliver and Alice, passing by Rosedean one day, turned in through the gate. "Why shouldn't we go in and ask Katty to come to tea?" It was Laura's suggestion. Somehow she was sorry for Katty—increasingly sorry. Yet she could not help feeling glad when Harber coldly informed her that Mrs. Winslow had left home, and would not be back for ten days.
At the very time that happy little group of people was at her door, Katty herself was standing in a queue of people waiting to take her ticket at York station.
Though Mrs. Winslow would have been honestly surprised had any one told her she was sentimental, she had actually come down by an earlier train than was necessary in order that she might retrace the ways that she and her friend had trodden together a year ago in January.
She had first gone to the Minster, moving swiftly along the paved streets where she had walked and talked slowly, pleasantly, with the dead man. Then she had wandered off to the picturesque thoroughfare lined with curiosity shops. How kind, how generous Godfrey had been to her just here! Every time she looked up in her pretty little drawing-room at Rosedean, his gift met her eye.
While she was engaged on this strange, painful pilgrimage, there welled up in Katty's heart a flood of agonised regret and resentment. She told herself bitterly that Godfrey's death had aged her—taken the spring out of her. Small wonder indeed that in these last few weeks she should have come to hate Laura with a steady, burning flame of hate....
So it was that Katty Winslow was in a queer mental and physical state when she returned to the big railway station to complete her journey. She did not feel at all in the mood to face the gay little houseparty where she was sure of an uproarious, as well as of an affectionate, welcome.
As she stood in the queue of rather rough North-country folk, waiting to take her third-class ticket, there swept over her a sudden, vivid recollection of that incident—the hearing of a voice which at the time had seemed so oddly familiar—which had happened on the day she had parted from Godfrey Pavely for the last time.
And then—as in a blinding, yet illuminating flash—there came to her the conviction, nay, more, the certain knowledge, as to whose voice it had been that she had heard on the last occasion when she had stood there, in the large, bare booking office. The voice she had heard—she was quite, quite sure of it now, it admitted of no doubt in her mind at all—had been the peculiar, rather high-pitched, voice of Gillie Baynton....
She visualised the arresting appearance of the man who had been the owner of the voice, and who had gazed at her with that rather impudent, jeering glance of bold admiration. Of course it was Gillie, but Gillie disguised—Gillie with his cheeks tinted a curious greenish-orange colour, Gillie with his fair hair dyed black, Gillie—her brain suddenly supplied the link she was seeking for feverishly—exactly answering to the description of the sinister Fernando Apra—the self-confessed murderer of Godfrey Pavely. Katty left the queue in which she was standing, and walked across to a bench.