him some letter or something that may incriminate her. We must get there and search him before Booth brings the doctor. What fortune that the body has been left unattended.”

“But is it?” Eric queried. “Don’t you think that Harris has spread the news among the other keepers and one or other of them are lurking near out of curiosity? Wouldn’t it be infernally awkward for us if we were discovered rifling the dead man’s pockets?”

“We must risk everything—for Tibbie’s sake—for the sake of the family,” I declared decisively, and impelled by my words he hurried along at my side.

“You have given it as your opinion that they were once lovers,” I continued. “Therefore, if he had come there to blackmail her, what more natural than that he should carry with him something by which to impress her with his power over her? At all costs, therefore, we must try and satisfy ourselves that there is nothing to incriminate her.”

“Ah! my dear Wilfrid,” he sighed. “It is really terrible—too terrible.”

“This is not the moment to discuss the affair. We must act,” I urged, and together we got over a gate and turned into a grass field which was a shorter cut to the wood.

“This way,” my friend directed. “The spot is up at that corner,” pointing away up the hill, where the wood loomed darkly against the sky.

Truth to tell, I shared Eric’s fear that Harris or one of his sons might be lurking in the neighbourhood, yet I said nothing. My only thought was for the woman who had been my friend, my playmate, the dainty love of my early youth. She might be all that her enemies said of her, yet for her mother’s sake, for Jack’s sake, I meant—if possible—to save her.

Keeping in the shadow of the hedgerows and walls, I allowed my companion to direct my footsteps. With his long practice in those boundless forests of eternal night in Equatorial Africa, he had learnt how to creep along with scarce a sound. He motioned to me to be silent, and presently we crossed the big turnip field and entered the thicket at the point where he had entered it that afternoon.

“This will destroy my track,” he whispered. “Tread always on your toes.”

His example I followed, malting my way through the brambles and undergrowth until, of a sudden, we came out into a small open space beneath some big trees on the edge of the wood itself, and there upon the ground I saw something lying. In the 

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