But I need not have wasted myself. The puzzle was not quite inexplicable. For the moment Fanny's miseries seemed to have vanished. Animation came into her face and voice and movements as she told me how, the night before, thinking that her mother and I might have returned from Lyme Regis, she had come tapping. And suddenly as she stood in the garden, her face close to the glass, an utterly strange one had thrust itself into view, and the figure of "a ghastly gloating little dwarfish creature" had appeared in the porch.
At first she had supposed—but only for an instant—that it was myself. "Of course, mother had mentioned him in her letters, but"—and Fanny opened her eyes at me—"I never guessed he was, well, like that."
Then in her folly, and without giving him the least opportunity to explain his presence there, she had begun railing at him, and had accused him of forcing his way in to rob the house: "And he stood there, hunched up, looking at me—out of my own house." The very picture of Fanny helplessly standing there at her own door, and of these two facing each other like that in the porch—this ridiculous end to my fine stratagem, filled me with a miserable amusement. I leaned back my head where I sat, shrilly and dismally laughing and laughing, until tears sprang pricklingly into my eyes. If any listener had been abroad in the woods that night, he would, I think, have hastened his departure.
But Fanny seemed to be shocked at my levity. She peered anxiously into the clear night-glooms around us.
"And what!" I said, still striving to regain command over myself. "What happened then? Oh, Fanny, not a policeman?"
But her memory of what had followed was confused, or perhaps she had no wish to be too exact. All that I could win from her for certain was that after an angry and bitter talk between herself and Mr Anon, he had simply slammed my door behind him and dared her to do her worst.
"That was pretty brave of him," I remarked.
"Oh," said Fanny amiably, "I am not blaming your friend, Midgetina. He seemed to be perfectly competent."
Yet even now I remained unsatisfied. If Fanny had come secretly to Beechwood, as she had suggested, and had spent the night with a friend, solely to hear the last tidings of Mr Crimble, what was this other trouble, so desperate that she had lost both her wits and her temper at finding Mr Anon there? Supposing the house had been empty? My curiosity overcame me, and the none too ingenuous question slipped from my tongue: "Did you want some of the money for mourning, then, Fanny?"
Her dark, pale face, above the black, enveloping cloak, met my look with astonishment.