“She made me point out the route which I believed was taken by the old subterranean passage. That’s why we walked through the fields and were seen together.”
“Well,” I said at last, “I want you to do something for me, Knutton, and if you carry it through successfully I’ll give you a sovereign instead of half a sovereign. I want you to go over to the Glebe Farm this afternoon and take a letter to her. It must be given to her in secret, remember. Ask for a reply, merely yes or no. You understand?”
“Oh, I’ll take the letter, sir, an’ be glad to do it,” the old labourer cried eagerly.
“Very well, we’ll go back together to your cottage and I’ll write it. Then you take it, and I’ll wait at the Sonde Arms until you return with the reply. You must be careful, however, that this man Purvis doesn’t see you, or you may make it awkward for Miss Drummond in a variety of ways.”
“Trust me, sir,” was his response. “I knows my way about the Glebe Farm. I worked there on and off for three years.”
“Then you know the big barn. Underneath it is a door leading to some steps. Do you know them?”
“Know them, why, o’ course I do. The steps lead nowhere. There was once a well at the bottom, they say, but it’s been bricked up because it used to over-flow up to the barn door.”
It was evident that the entrance had been unsuspected, and that the subterranean communication had only very recently been opened.
The old fellow shouldered his spade and with bent back walked beside me into Rockingham, where, upon a leaf from my note-book, I wrote an urgent line to the woman whose great beauty and sweet grace had enchanted me. I prayed of her to do me a favour and give me an appointment at a spot on the high road between Great Easton and Caldecott which I had noticed that morning—a place where, according to the sign-post, the road to Market Harborough joined that to Wellingborough. I sealed the note and, having watched the old fellow down the road, turned into the Sonde Arms to smoke and kill time until his return.
What he had told me added a further touch of romance to that pale-faced, troubled woman who had so strangely entered my life. Impatient and fidgety I lounged in the inn, smoking and trying to read the newspaper, until at last Ben, after an absence of an hour and a half, returned.