"Something has been dropped in the church, Hunt," he carelessly said; "I'll go myself with Lewis, and see that he meddles with nothing."
"Something dropped in the church?" repeated the old man; "then, I suppose, that was what the other college gent has been after; though he didn't say nothing of it. He was here afore I had opened our shutters."
"Which of them was that?" asked George Prattleton, pausing, with the key in his hand.
"It were Mr. Arkell, sir; him what goes in to practise on the organ. He were in yesterday practising, and he flung the key back when he'd done, and broke our cat's chaney saucer, and then made off. I've been a showing him the mischief he went and done."
"Was that Mr. Arkell, do you say? Has Arkell been here this morning?"
"Why, it ain't two minutes since, sir. He cut up that way as if he was going straight home."
And as the man spoke, there flashed into George Prattleton's mind the little episode that had so startled him and his friend Rolls in the night—the finding of the church door open, when they had surely locked it. It must have been then that Henry Arkell got out of the church. How much had he witnessed of the scene in the vestry? had he recognised him, George Prattleton?
George Prattleton exchanged a look with Lewis, and hung the key up again, making some vague remark to the clerk, that Mr. Arkell had probably found what they were about to look for, if he had been to practise so recently as yesterday evening. Shutting the door behind him, he walked away with Lewis, whose senses were in a state of hopeless perplexity.
"He has got out, you hear, Lewis."
"But how could he get out?" returned Lewis. "He's not a fairy, to get through the keyhole, and he couldn't have got down from the windows! It's an impossibility."