“Undoubtedly. He must have attracted her to the window, and persuaded her to come down into the grounds. He was very plausible; no man would dream that he was not sane, only I, who have seen” – he drew a long breath – “what I have seen. I’ll tell you this, Colonel,” he said, with sudden vehemence, “not all the lordship of Chelford, not all the estates, not even the Chelford treasure, would make me live again my life of the past five years! There are times,” he said, his voice trembling with passion, “when I feel I would like to dig up the abbey and scatter its stones in the dust, raze this house to the ground, and turn the place into a public park.” He laughed at his own excess. “I am talking like an idiot. This place belongs to a family that knows not Harry. He is just a terrible accident. My dear mother often told me how worried my father was about Harry, his queer, secretive ways. And yet in a way he is a sportsman, one of the best shots in England as a boy, a great runner, and a wonderful fellow over the country, until about eight years ago, when this treasure bug got into his brain and he shut himself away from us all and gave his mind and his soul to this wild chase.”

“The gold?”

Dick shook his head.

“No,” he said. “If it were only the gold, that would have been an intelligent interest in life.”

He described Harry’s search for the elixir, the famous Life Water of which the ancient Chelford had written in his diary.

“It is probably no more than a flask of a native wine – arrack or the like,” said Dick. “Poor Harry!”

Miss Wenner had intended leaving by the early morning train but had changed her mind. Possibly the arrival of Fabrian Gilder had been a factor. She had one solution for Leslie’s disappearance.

“Have you searched the abbey?” she asked, not once but a dozen times.

Dick was weary; the abbey had been his first thought. He had suspected this was Harry’s hiding-place, and with his own hands had taken a basket of provisions for him, but this, he saw, was untouched.

There was one possibility about the underground cavern, and that was the second door, and he had ordered the blacksmith and his assistant to be at the stone tower at two o’clock that afternoon with instruments, one of which had to be procured from London.

The presence of Miss Wenner was not as distasteful to Gilder as he thought it would have been. To use a phrase of childhood, she was “on his side.” In very truth, Miss Wenner was on anybody’s side if they happened to be agreeable to her.