“I am sure I saw somebody at the lower end of the drive. You were smoking a cigar: I could see the little red glow; and at first I thought it was Harry, and this morning I found the end of the cigar near the lodge gates. Richard Alford, do you ever sleep?”

“Frequently,” he said, with a smile, and put his arm round her shoulder. “I’m being brotherly: take no alarm,” he mocked her. “Leslie, dear, will you promise?”

“What?” she asked.

“Not to wander through the fields at odd hours. I don’t want to alarm you – I feel a brute as it is – but there may be real danger for the next day or two. Please don’t ask me what it is, because I can’t tell you; I’m not so sure that I know.”

She turned this over in her mind for a long time.

“Has it to do with the Chelford treasure?” she asked, and, to her surprise, he nodded.

34

In sight of her house he left her, and, remounting his horse, cantered away. She watched him until a bend of the road hid him from view, and then with a little sigh she walked slowly towards her home.

What was the mystery? She had never taken the Black Abbot very seriously, believing that the apparition had its origin in a stupid practical joke carried out by a villager with an histrionic bent. The legend she knew: Dick had told her, and Harry, who kept alive all the legends of the family, had described in detail the eight-hundred-year-old murder. But how was the Black Abbot affecting her? And what was the meaning of this close guard that Dick Alford was keeping on her? She had no doubt that it was he who was watching the house in the early hours of the morning.

In the night she had reached a momentous decision. It had been made after long thought and heart-searching, and she would have given everything to have had the courage to have told Dick that morning. But in that bright, sunlit world she was averse from hurting him. But would he be hurt? Her life’s future hung on that question.

She had been dimly conscious that a man was standing before the gate of Willow House. She had seen him when she was some distance away, and now, as she drew near, she had a feeling that he was waiting to speak to her. He was tall and wearing an ill-fitting grey suit and a golf cap; from his lips drooped a limp cigarette. He took his hands out of his pockets as she came near and touched his cap, and then she recognised the ill-favoured Thomas, the ex-footman.

“Good morning, miss,” he said.

“Good morning, Thomas.”

She viewed with more interest than she had done heretofore the lank, awkwardly made man.

“I wonder if I can have a word with you, miss?”

She hesitated.