The servant, however, came back with word that her ladyship had gone out. And at that Slyne scowled. It was at a most inopportune moment for him that Sallie had taken a liberty of which she would not have dreamed a few days before; and, furthermore, it did not fit in with his plans at all to have her making such use of her new-found freedom; there was no telling whom she might meet—there was that fellow Carthew, for instance!
"Which way did her ladyship go, do you know?" he called after the footman, as casually as he could.
"To the village, I think, sir," the man replied, and he rose, yawning, to look discontentedly out at the wintry landscape. It was very beautiful in the brisk morning sunshine, but also very wet underfoot.
"I'll stroll down the road after her," he announced, "and fetch her back. You can be packing up in the meantime, Jobling. The steamer south sails early in the afternoon."
He did not hesitate to leave the two conspirators alone together again; he judged that he had succeeded in cowing them both. He even smiled to himself on his way outdoors.
"I thought I was done for when I met Dubois," he reflected, perfectly self-satisfied, "but—I was really in luck. And that was a most opportune chat I had with Mullins in London, too. I've got Jobling fairly fixed. If I can't manage the old man—I'm a bigger fool than I take myself for. And I've made things all right for myself with Sallie, or I'm mistaken."
He paused in the main hall to look appreciatively about him while a servant was fetching his coat and cap from the cloak-room. The sun was streaming in through the stained glass of a lofty, mullioned window, the heart of each of whose panels showed in vivid scarlet against the light a clenched hand holding a dagger, the Jura crest.
"They won it all that way," said Slyne to himself, and drew a deep breath of contentment as he looked round the noble hall again. He felt very proud of the place already, and only wished that some of his former friends could have seen him there.
Outside, beyond the drawbridge, he halted to look admiringly up at the massive, ivy-clad frontage of the Main Keep, with its crenellated ramparts and narrow fighting-windows and bartizan. Then he turned with a high heart toward the road that runs between hazel thickets and clumps of alder or silver birch down the long hill to the village and the seashore. He was humming a contented tune to himself as he tramped through the melting snow.
He had not far to seek Sallie. Within the open doorway of the first cottage he came to, he caught sight of her beside the peat-fire with a laughing child on her lap and its proud mother smiling beside her.