Walking a few paces away, Cleek rested the paper against the wall, scribbled a few hasty words, sealed them up in the envelope, and then handed it over to Hamer.
"Here, take this thing to Miss Lorne. You'll find her in the drawing-room," he said, as he threw the remaining sheets which he had employed as a sort of writing pad upon one of the hall chairs. "You can attend to that litter afterward. Move sharp!"
He turned as he spoke, as if to go upstairs again, but the very instant Hamer had disappeared he went fleetly back to the chair, caught up one of the sheets of paper, folded it carefully, slid it into his pocket, and passing swiftly and soundlessly down the hall, opened the door and went out again into the night.
Hitherto all had been speculation, theory, guesswork, not irrefutable facts; hitherto all clues had been mere possibilities, never actual certainties. Now——
The curious smile travelled up his cheek, slipped down again, and left his face as hard and as colourless as a mask of stone. He turned as he rounded the angle of the house and glanced back to where the windows of the dining-room cut two luminous rectangles in the fragrant, flower-scented darkness; then his eye travelled farther on, and dwelt a moment on the chinks of light that arrowed out from the curtained bay of the library.
"Poor old chap! Poor, dear old chap!" he said between shut teeth.
The tightly woven fabric of last night's mystery had started to unravel. In one little corner a flaw had suddenly sprung into existence, and to-night the first loosened thread was in this man's hands.
He set his back to the lighted windows and forged on through the darkness until the swerving path brought him to the little summerhouse where, earlier, he had first met Ailsa, and stepping in, threw himself into a rustic seat and bent forward with his elbows upon his knees and his face between his hands: a grim and silent figure in the loneliness and the darkness.
Five minutes passed—six, seven—and found him still sitting there, still communing with his own thoughts, though it was now nearing ten o'clock, and he had told Dollops to be at the wall angle to meet him at nine. But suddenly his attitude changed; his hands dropped, his head jerked upward, as a sleeping cat's does when it hears a gnawing mouse, and he was on his feet, alert, eager, all alive, in a twinkling. Half a minute later Miss Lorne stepped from the grass on to the gravel and found him waiting for her in the arch of the summerhouse doorway.
"It is you at last, then, is it?" he said, reaching out to her through the darkness. "Take my hand and I will guide you if you cannot see the way clearly. I can't risk striking a match."