After lunch Lorian and I again set out in company, but my friend appeared to be in anything but sporting humour. We bore off at a sharp angle from the Colonel and some others who were set upon the rough shooting on the western rim of the moors and made for the honeycombed ground which led one upward to the cliff edge.
Abruptly, we found ourselves upon the sheer brink, with the floor of the ocean at our feet and all the great Atlantic before us.
“Let us relent of our murderous purpose,” said Lorian, dropping comfortably on to a patch of velvety turf and producing his pipe. “I have dragged you up here with the malicious intention of talking to you.”
I was not sorry to hear it. There was much that I wished to discuss with him.
“I should have stayed to say something to some one,” he added, carefully stuffing his briar, “but first I wanted to say something to you.” He paused, fumbling for matches. “What,” he continued, finding some and striking one, “is Felix Hulme’s little game?”
“He wants to marry Miss Reynor.”
“I know; but he needn’t get so infernally savage because she won’t accept him. He looked at me in a positively murderous way at lunch to-day.”
“So you noticed that?”
“Yes—and I saw that you noticed it, too.”
“Listen,” I said. “Leaving Hulme out of the question, there is an altogether more mysterious business afoot.” And I told him of the episode of the previous night.