She walked back with them a little way, comforting them, as best she could. And her sympathy, her sweetness did—strangely—comfort them. When she left them, they walked on, talking tenderly of her, counting on her good fortune, if there was none for them.
At the end of the walk, towards Monk Lawrence, another figure emerged from the distance. Delia started, then gathered all her wits; for it was Lathrop.
He hurried towards her, breathless, cutting all preliminaries—
"I was coming to find you. I arrived this morning. There is something wrong! I have just been to the house, and there is no one there."
"What do you mean?"
"No one. I went to Daunt's rooms. Everything locked. The house absolutely dark—everywhere. And I know that he has had the strictest orders!"
Without a word, she began to run, and he beside her. When she slackened, he told her that while in London he had made the most skilful enquiries he could devise as to the plot he believed to be on foot. But—like Delia's own—they had been quite fruitless. Those persons who had shared suspicion with him in December were now convinced that the thing was dropped. All that he had ascertained was that Miss Marvell was in town, apparently recovered, and Miss Andrews with her.
"Well—and were you pleased with your raid?" he asked her, half mockingly, as he opened the gate of Monk Lawrence for her.
She resented the question, and the tone of it, remembering his first grandiloquent letter to her.
"You ought to be," she said, drily. "It was the kind of thing you recommended."