Roy did not know, but thought it very possible he was some workman on the farm near by, though his appearance was not quite that of a common laborer.
“Didn’t he have queer eyes? Wasn’t one of them turned, or put out, or something?” was Georgie’s next query, and Roy answered laughingly:
“Really, you were more observing than I was. Why I don’t know whether the man had two eyes or four. I only know that we owe our lives to him, whoever he may be.”
He did not tell her all that had transpired at Leighton with regard to the stranger, or how, when he left home, Russell was busy nailing windows which had no fastenings, and barricading doors, and doing numerous things, which indicated that from some quarter he was apprehending a night attack upon his master’s property. Russell, too, had seen the stranger’s face more distinctly than Georgie had, and he could have sworn, ay, did swear, that he had seen it before, and had his fingers on that throat down in the basement of his master’s house, years before, in New York.
“I know it is the same, and he’ll be here to-night, maybe, to try his luck again,” he said, to Roy and Edna, who made light of his fears, and told him he was always seeing burglars in the shade of every tree and around every corner of the house.
Remembering Georgie’s nervousness, Roy kindly suggested that she should not be told of Russell’s suspicion, and so he answered her lightly when she questioned him of the stranger, but felt a little startled when her description of the disfigured eye tallied so exactly with what Russell had said. He did not stay late at Oakwood that night, but returned earlier than usual to Leighton, which he found bolted, and barred, and locked, as if it had been some fortified castle ready to be besieged; but Russell’s burglar did not make his appearance, a little to the disappointment of the good man, who narrated to Edna the particulars in full of his encounter with the midnight robber, who managed to break away, and escape from justice after all.
“What was his name?” Edna asked, more by way of saying something than because she was specially interested in the subject.
“John Sand he gave, though we didn’t believe it was correct; we thought he took an assumed name to spare his wife. They said he had one, a very handsome young girl, and I think she was in the court-room when he was tried.”
Just then Edna was called away by Mrs. Churchill, and Russell was left alone to think over the one adventure of his life, his conflict with the robber, of which he was never weary of talking.
What Georgie had endured the previous night no one guessed. Tortured with doubts which nearly drove her wild, she paced her room for hours, going over again and again in her own mind all the evidence she had ever received of his death, the his referring to the original of the spectre haunting her so cruelly now.