“No, I brought a lantern.” He removed as he spoke the cap of a small bull’s-eye lantern and threw its light on the path. “Who’s the fool now?”
“Let us get home,” Basset snapped.
John Audley locked the iron gate behind them and they started. The light removed their worst difficulties and they reached the open park without mishap. But long before they gained the house the elder man’s strength failed, and he was glad to lean on Basset’s arm. On that a sense of weakness on the one side and of pity on the other closed their differences. “After all,” Audley said wearily, “I don’t know what I should have done if you had not come.”
“You’d have stayed there!”
“And that would have been—Heavens, what a pity that would have been!” Audley paused and struck his stick on the ground. “I must take care of myself, I must take care of myself! You don’t know, Basset, what I——”
“And I don’t want to know—here!” Basset replied. “When you are safe at home, you may tell me what you like.”
In the courtyard they came on Toft, who was looking out for them with a lantern. “Thank God, you’re safe, sir,” he said. “I was growing alarmed about you.”
“Where were you,” Basset asked sharply, “when I came in?” John Audley was too tired to speak.
“I had stepped out at the front to look for the master,” Toft replied. “I fancied that he had gone out that way.”
Basset did not believe him, but he could not refute the story. “Well, get the brandy,” he said, “and bring it to the library. Mr. Audley has been out too long and is tired.”