"In truth, my daughter," he said, addressing her, "you have fully made your excuse, and I allow it right gladly. I may well conceive that in the haste and labour of making ready on so sudden summons, both you and your niece may easily have forgat the matter. I need not keep you longer from your household duties. God grant you a good even!" Mistress Grena had no resource but to withdraw in answer to this dismissal, her heart filled with sore forebodings. She had hoped the excuse might be held to cover the whole family; but it was evident the priest had no intention of accepting it as including the male portion thereof. As she passed Mr Roberts, with her back to the priest, she gave him a warning look; but her hope that he would take the warning was as small as it could well be. "And now, my son," said the Rector softly, turning to his remaining victim, "how say you? Were you likewise busied in preparing the gentlewomen for their journey?" CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR. COUNTERPLOT. A man to be very much pitied was poor Mr Roberts. Not only had he to pacify the priest, but Mistress Grena's line of defence, plausible as it sounded, had unhappily crossed and invalidated the excuse he had intended to make for himself. His faint, hazy purpose up to that time had been to deny any knowledge of the escape; but after it had been thus represented as a natural, every-day occurrence, how was he to keep up the story? Yet he had no other ready. "No, Father--ay, it--I was a-bed," was his blundering reply. The priest's voice was sweet as a newly-tuned piano. "Was it not strange, my son, that you heard no sounds from beneath? Or went you up, knowing what was passing?" What was the poor man to do? If he acknowledged that he knew of the escape of the fugitives, he laid himself open to the charge of "aiding and abetting"; if he denied it, he practically denied also the truth of Grena's defence. At that moment he would have given every acre and shilling in his possession to be free from this horrible cross-questioning. The cat watched the poor mouse wriggle with grim satisfaction. Either way, it would come to its claws at last. Suddenly the scene of the morning was reproduced to the mind's eye of the tortured man. Roger Hall's voice seemed to say again--"Have you asked Him, Master?" Faintly, tremblingly in the unwontedness of the act, the request was made, and even that slight contact with the unchanging Rock steadied the wavering feet. He must speak truth, and uphold Grena. "Father," he said in a changed tone, "my sister told you true. The journey was hastened, and that suddenly." The change in his tone puzzled the priest. What had come to the man, in that momentary interval, to nerve him thus anew? "How came the news, my son?" Mr Roberts was thankfully able to answer that he knew not.