clearly, but he thought she was young. She was not dead, as he had at first feared, but in a deep faint. He began to chafe her hands, and had just bethought him of the tiny stream which he had observed that morning, when she showed signs of returning consciousness. He raised her in his arms, hearing a sigh flutter past her lips. A moan succeeded the sigh; she said something he could not catch, and began weakly to cry.
“Don’t cry!” Sir Richard said. “You are quite safe.”
She caught her breath on a sob, and stiffened in his hold. He felt her little hands close on his arm. Then she began to tremble.
“No, there is nothing to frighten you,” he said in his cool way. “You will be better directly.”
“Oh!” The exclamation sounded terrified. “Who are you? Oh, let me go!”
“Certainly I will let you go, but are you able to stand yet? You do not know me, but I am perfectly harmless, I assure you.”
She made a feeble attempt to struggle up, and succeeded only in crouching on the path in a woebegone huddle, saying through her sobs: “I must go! Oh, I must go! I ought not to have come!”
“That I can well believe,” said Sir Richard, still on his knee beside her. “Why did you come? Or is that an impertinent question?”
It had the effect of redoubling her sobs. She buried her face in her hands, shuddering, and rocking herself to and fro, and gasping out unintelligible phrases.
“Well!” said a voice behind Sir Richard.
He looked quickly over his shoulder. “Pen! What are you doing here?”
“I followed you,” replied Pen, looking critically down at the weeping girl. “I brought a stout stick too, because I thought you were going to meet the odious stammering-man, and I feel sure he means to do you a mischief. Who is this?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” replied Sir Richard. “And presently I shall have something to say to you on the subject of this idiotic escapade of yours! My good child, can’t you stop crying?”
“What is she doing here?” asked Pen, unmoved by his strictures.
“Heaven knows! I found her lying on the path. How does one make a female stop crying?”
“I shouldn’t think you could. She’s going to have a fit of the vapours, I expect. And I do
“I was not hugging her.”
“It looked like it to me,” argued Pen.
“I suppose,” said Sir Richard sardonically, “you would have had me step over her, and walk on?”
“Yes, I would,” replied Pen promptly.
“Don’t be a little fool! The girl had fainted.”
“Oh!” Pen moved forward. “I wonder what made her do that? You know, it all seems extremely odd to me.”
“It seems quite as odd to me, let me tell you.” He laid his hand on the sobbing girl’s shoulder. “Come! You will not help matters by crying. Can’t you tell me what has happened to upset you so?”
The girl made a convulsive effort to choke back her hysterical tears, and managed to utter: “I was so frightened!”
“Yes, that I had realized. What frightened you?”
“There was a man!” gasped the girl. “And I hid, and then another man came, and they began to quarrel, and I dared not move for fear they should hear me, and the big one hit the other, and he fell down and lay still, and the big one took something out of his pocket, and went away, and oh, oh, he passed so close I c-could have touched him only by stretching out my hand! The other man never moved, and I was so frightened I ran, everything went black, and I think I fainted.”
“Ran away?” repeated Pen in disgusted accents. “What a poor-spirited thing to do! Didn’t you go to help the man who was knocked down?”
“Oh no, no, no!” shuddered the girl.
“I must say, I don’t think you deserve to have such an adventure. And if I were you I wouldn’t continue sitting in the middle of the path. It isn’t at all helpful, and it makes you look very silly.”
This severe speech had the effect of angering the girl. She reared up her head, and exclaimed: “How dare you? You are the rudest young man I ever met in my life!”
Sir Richard put his hand under her elbow, and assisted her to her feet. “Ah—accept my apologies on my nephew’s behalf, ma’am!” he said, with only the faintest quiver in his voice. “A sadly ill-conditioned boy! May I suggest to you that you should rest on this bank for a few moments, while I go to investigate the—er—scene of the assault you so graphically described? My nephew—who has, you perceive, provided himself with a stout stick—will charge himself with your safety.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Pen mutinously.
“You will—for once in your life—do as you are told,” said Sir Richard, and, lowering the unknown on to the bank, strode on down the track towards the clearing in the wood.
Here the moonlight bathed the ground in its cold silver light. Sir Richard had no doubt that he would find Beverley Brandon, either stunned, or recovering from the effects of the blow which had felled him, but as he stepped into the clearing he saw not only one man lying still on the ground, but a second on his knees beside him.
Sir Richard trod softly, and it was not until he had approached to within a few feet of the little group that the kneeling man heard his footsteps, and looked quickly over his shoulder. The moonlight drained the world of colour, but even allowing for this the face turned towards Sir Richard was unnaturally pallid. It was the face of a very young man, and perfectly strange to Sir Richard.
“Who are you?” The question was shot out in a hushed, rather scared voice. The young man started to his feet, and took up an instinctively defensive pose.
“I doubt whether my name will convey very much to you, but, for what it is worth, it is Wyndham. What has happened here?”
The boy seemed quite distracted, and replied in a shaken tone: “I don’t know. I found him here—like this. I—I think he’s dead!”
“Nonsense!” said Sir Richard, putting him out of his way, and in his turn kneeling beside Beverley’s inanimate body. There was a bruise on the livid brow, and when Sir Richard raised Beverley his head fell back in a way that told its own tale rather horribly. Sir Richard saw the tree-stump, and realized that Beverley’s head must have struck it. He laid his body down again, and said without the least vestige of emotion: “You are perfectly right. His neck is broken.”
The boy dragged a handkerchief out of his pocket, and wiped his brow with it. “My God, who did it?—I—I didn’t, you know!”
“I don’t suppose you did,” Sir Richard replied, rising to his feet, and dusting the knees of his breeches.
“But it’s the most shocking thing! He was staying with me, sir!”
“Oh!” said Sir Richard, favouring him with a long, penetrating look.
“He’s Beverley Brandon—Lord Saar’s younger son!”
“I know very well who he is. You, I apprehend, are Mr Piers Luttrell
“Yes. Yes, I am. I knew him up at Oxford. Not very well, because I—well, to tell you the truth, I never liked him much. But a week ago he arrived at my home. He had been visiting friends, I think. I don’t know. But of course I—that is, my mother and I—asked him to stay, and he did. He has not been quite well—seemed to be in need of rest, and—and country air. Indeed, I can’t conceive how he comes to be here now, for he retired to his room with one of his sick headaches. At least, that was what he told my mother.”
“Then you did not come here in search of him?”
“No, no! I came—The fact is, I just came out to enjoy a stroll in the moonlight,” replied Piers, in a hurry.
“I see.” There was a dry note in Sir Richard’s voice.
“Why are
“For the same reason,” Sir Richard answered.
“But you know Brandon!”
“That circumstance does not, however, make me his murderer.”
“Oh no! I did not mean—but it seems so strange that you should both be in Queen Charlton!”
