"How d'ye do, Mr. Chattaway? Fine weather this!"
"We shall have a change before long; the glass is shifting. Anyone ill here?" continued Chattaway.
"Not they, I hope!" returned the surgeon with a laugh. "I give old Canham a look in now and then, when I am passing and can spare the time, just for a dish of gossip and to ask after his rheumatism. I suppose you thought I had quite forgotten you," he added, turning to the old man, who had risen and stood leaning on his crutch, looking, if Mr. Chattaway could but have understood it, half frightened to death. "It's a long time since I was here, Mark."
He sat down on the settle as he spoke, as if to intimate that he intended to take a dish of gossip then. Chattaway—ah! can he suspect? thought old Mark as he entered the lodge; a thing he did not do once in a year. Conscience does make cowards of us all—and it need not be altogether a guilty conscience to do this—and it was rendering Ann Canham as one paralysed. She would have given the whole world to leave the room, go up to Rupert, and guard as far as possible against noise; but she feared to excite suspicion. Foolish fears! Had Rupert not been there, Ann Canham would have passed in and out of the room twenty times without thinking of Mr. Chattaway.
"Madam Chattaway said you were ill, I remember," said he to Mark Canham. "Fever, I understood. She said something about seeing your fever mixture at the chemist's at Barmester."
Ann Canham turned hot and cold. She did not dare to even glance at her father, still less prompt him; but it so happened that, willing to spare him unnecessary worry, she had not mentioned the little episode of meeting Mrs. Chattaway at Barmester. Old Mark was cautious, however.
"Yes, Squire. I've had a deal o' fever lately, on and off. Perhaps Doctor King could give me some'at better for't than them druggists gives."
"Perhaps I can," said Mr. King. "I'll have a talk with you presently. How is Madam to-day, Mr. Chattaway?"
"As well as usual, except in the matter of grumbling," was the ungracious answer. And the master of the Hold, perhaps not finding it particularly lively there, went out as he delivered it, giving a short adieu to Mr. King.
Meanwhile, George Ryle reached the Hold. Maude saw his approach from the drawing-room window, and came to the hall-door. "I want to speak to you," she whispered.