The ardent color dyed her face again; her lips moved. She put out her hand towards him, and as he took it he understood that she wished him to bid her good-by and to leave her alone. He heard what she struggled to say:
"He must not come, he must not come."
"No," he accepted sadly for his friend, "No, he must not come."
Bulstrode had chosen those times for going to The Dials when his host was least likely to take note of his absence; but it happened that more than once the Duke missed him at just the wrong moment, and more than once had been given the direction in which Bulstrode's footsteps had turned.
One morning, during a talk with his agent, Westboro'—the map of the district before him—enquired what had ever been done with the property known as The Dials, and into whose hands the old place had fallen. It seemed that it had been let for some months to a foreigner, a widow, who lived there, and alone.
Westboro' considered the farms and forests, as they lay mapped out before him, at the extreme foot of the castle's parks. It was a little square of some fifty acres by itself; it had never interested him before.
How long did the lease run on? Did the agent know? He believed for another year.
The Duke gave instructions to have the property looked into, with a view to purchase. And as the man put up his papers, he vouchsafed to his employer:
"The present tenant is very exclusive; she sees nobody, has never, I believe, even been to the Abbey. An old gardener who has been kept on says the servants are all foreign."
The Duke gave only a tepid interest to the information which would have passed entirely from his mind had it not been for his next meeting with Jimmy Bulstrode.