"Ah, I should have known you anywhere, Mrs. Penn. What had I or my horse done to you that you should attack us?"
She turned and faced him. It really seemed as though she believed herself in the right in all the past acts, and felt proud to have done so well. All this while, it must be remembered, she supposed George Heneage was alive in the west wing, and would soon be taken from it to a criminal prison. She could afford to make concessions now.
"It was not you or your horse I attacked intentionally. I mistook you for another. For that brother of yours, Mr. Chandos, whose liberty will soon be put beyond jeopardy, and his life after it. Your great likeness to George Heneage, as he looked in those old days at Hallam, is unfortunate. For one thing, it has caused me to hate you; when, to speak candidly, I think in yourself there is not much to hate. You"—turning her flashing eyes on the men—"are seeing me out of the house because I have acted my part effectually in it; a part that Sir Richard Mayne himself would say I was justified in; but there is a greater criminal concealed above, for whom a warrant is, as I expect, already in force."
"You are wrong," said Mr. Chandos. "Were the whole establishment of Scotland Yard to make their appearance here, each with a warrant in his hand, they would scarcely execute it. It has been a long, a weary, and a wearing battle: Edwin Barley against George Heneage: but God has shown himself on the side of mercy."
The words puzzled her a little. "Has he escaped?" she fiercely asked. "Has he left the house?"
"He has not left it, Mrs. Penn; he is in the west wing." She threw up her head with a glow of triumph, and walked rapidly away down the broad walk, the policemen escorting her.
Standing at the back of the hall in utter amazement, partly at seeing Mrs. Penn go forth at all, partly at the object she presented in the grey cloak, was Lizzy Dene. "Miss," she said to me, as I stood just inside the great dining-room, "I should say she must have been the one to frighten Black Knave that night."
"Perhaps she was, Lizzy. Her cloak is grey."
An impulse came over me that I would ask Lizzy Dene the motive of her suspicious conduct in the past. Now that the culprit had turned out to be Mrs. Penn, Lizzy Dene must have been innocent. Stepping within the large dining-room, I asked her there and then.
"Ah," said she, with a sort of fling out of the hands, habitual to her when annoyed or in pain, "I don't mind telling now. I was in trouble at that time."