“He’s a good deal of a traveler, Mr. Pickering is. He passed through only this morning, so the mail-boy told me. You may have met him at the station.” “Oh, yes; to be sure; so I did!” I replied. I was not as good a liar as Bates; and there was nothing to be gained by denying that I had met the executor in the village. “I had a very pleasant talk with him. He was on the way to California with several friends.”

“That is quite his way, I understand,—private cars and long journeys about the country. A very successful man is Mr. Pickering. Your grandfather had great confidence in him, did Mr. Glenarm.”

“Ah, yes ! A fine judge of character my grandfather was ! I guess John Marshall Glenarm could spot a rascal about as far as any man in his day.”

I felt like letting myself go before this masked scoundrel. The density of his mask was an increasing wonder to me. Bates was the most incomprehensible human being I had ever known. I had been torn with a thousand conflicting emotions since I overheard him discussing the state of affairs at Glenarm House with Pickering in the chapel porch; and Pickering’s acquaintance with the girl in gray brought new elements into the affair that added to my uneasiness. But here was a treasonable dog on whom the stress of conspiracy had no outward effect whatever.

It was an amazing situation, but it called for calmness and eternal vigilance. With every hour my resolution grew to stand fast and fight it out on my own account without outside help. the afternoon I had heard the voice of the girl in gray saying to me: “You are a man, and I have heard that you have had some experience in taking care of yourself, A thousand times during Mr. Glenarm.”

It was both a warning and a challenge, and the memory of the words was at once sobering and cheering.

Bates waited. Of him, certainly, I should ask no questions touching Olivia Armstrong. To discuss her with a blackguard servant even to gain answers to baffling questions about her was not to my liking. And, thank God ! I taught myself one thing, if nothing more, in those days at Glenarm House : I learned to bide my time.

“I’ll give you a note to Mr. Stoddard in the morning. You may go now.”

“Yes, sir.”

The note was written and despatched. The chaplain was not at his lodgings, and Bates reported that he had left the message. The answer came presently by the hand of the Scotch gardener, Ferguson, a short, wiry, raw-boned specimen. I happened to open the door myself, and brought him into the library until I could read Stoddard’s reply. Ferguson had, I thought, an uneasy eye, and his hair, of an ugly carrot color, annoyed me.