The lawyer's outer door was open. There was a second door in the passage, furnished with a knocker: the office opened on the left. Mr. Chattaway tried the office-door; more as a matter of form than anything else. It was locked, as he expected, and would be until nine o'clock. So he gave an imposing knock at the other.
"I shall just catch him after breakfast," soliloquised he, "and can have a quiet quarter-of-an-hour with him, undisturbed by——Is Mr. Flood at home?"
He had tried the door as a matter of form, and in like manner put the question, passing in without ceremony: the servant arrested him.
"Mr. Flood's out, sir. He is gone to London."
"Gone to London!" ejaculated Chattaway.
"Yes, sir, not an hour ago. Went by the eight o'clock train."
It was so complete a check to all his imaginings, that for a minute the master of Trevlyn Hold found speech desert him. Many a bad man on the first threat of evil flies to a lawyer, in the belief that he can, by the exercise of his craft, bring him out of it. Chattaway, after a night of intolerable restlessness, had come straight off to his lawyer, Flood, with the intention of confiding the whole affair to him, and asking what was to be done in it; never so much as glancing at the possibility of that legal gentleman's absence.
"Went up by the eight o'clock train?" he repeated when he found his voice.
"Yes, sir."
"And when's he coming home?"