The light breeze took his voice over the chapel ruins and carried its echoes out to sea; but there came back no answer of any kind.
"Well, this is a rum go," cried John, looking up, and down, and round about, in his bewilderment. "Surely Mr. Anthony can't have come out and gone home!" he added, the unlikely notion flashing on him; for, when thoroughly puzzled we are all apt to catch at straws of improbability. "He couldn't have come out without my seeing him, and me never beyond view of the gate: unless it was in the minute that I was lighting my pipe by Jack Tuff's, when I had my back turned. But yet--how was it Mr. Anthony did not see me?"
Unable to solve these doubts, but still thinking that was how it must have been, the landlord went home with a rapid step. Before he gained it, he had quite made his mind up that it was so; he fully believed his guest was by this time sound asleep in his bed, and called himself a donkey for waiting out all that while. John Bent put his hand on the handle of his door to enter softly, and found it fastened. Fastened just as firmly as the gate had been.
"Where's Ned, I wonder?" he cried aloud, alluding to his man; and he knocked with his hand pretty sharply.
There was no more response to this knock than there had been to the shouts he had been lately sending forth. He knocked again and shook the door. The moonbeams still played upon the sea; a white sail or two of the night fishing boats gleamed out; he put his back against the door and gazed on the scene while he waited. No good, as he knew, to go round to the front entrance; that was sure to be closed. John knocked the third time.
The window above his head was flung open at this juncture, and Mrs. Bent's nightcapped head came out.
"Oh, it's you, is it!" she tartly cried. "I thought, for my part, you had taken up your abode in the road for the night."
"Ned's sitting up, I suppose, Dorothy. Why does he not open the door?"
"Ned will not open the door till he has my orders. There! A pretty decent thing, this is, for a respectable householder of your age to come home between one and two in the morning! If you are so fond of prancing up and down the road in the moonlight, filling a fresh pipe at every trick and turn, why don't you stay there till the house is opened to-morrow?"
"Jack Tuff must have told you that!"