Day after day went by, and Beryl never opened her lips. Her sullen silence was as hopeless as her pale face, but both got on the nerves of her jailers. If Lord Erceldonne had dared, with what good-will he would have put an end to them! Raimond had gone to London, and sent back a letter by the round-faced boy that made his father curse at each day passed with nothing done. Would he never come back? Was he out of his senses that he did not see there was no time to lose? Why was he “unexpectedly detained”? As the third week crawled by Lord Erceldonne lost patience. Night after night he paced the gravel, listening for the wheels that never came. But when the fourth was gone, and the fifth, he dared not listen, for he imagined wheels in each gust of wind. And the wind blew eerily at nights over the moorland. “The boy is mad!” he said to himself, aloud, alone in that lonely room down-stairs, when the two women were gone to bed. Behind him some one laughed, or was it outside the open window? Lord Erceldonne forgot patience. He stared round the empty room, flung open the thick wooden shutters on the gusty spring night, and called aloud: “Raimond! Raimond! Why the devil don’t you come in?” There was no answer. From far away he heard the sound of a moorland brook that his strained ears had surely turned into mocking laughter. Yet he drew sharply back from the window, and shut it with frenzied haste. It was no brook that had whispered in his very ear from the darkness under the window. “Mad, mad!” like an echo. “It’s the solitude, the cursed waiting.” He wiped his forehead. “It’s got on my nerves.” For the whispers had been labored, un-English, as if some one repeated sound, not sense; the voice that of the madman on the island. Imagination was making a fool of him; the thing was impossible. Yet he dared not go to bed, and his thoughts even Mother Felicitas might not have envied. The next afternoon, in broad day, he fairly gasped with astonishment, for his long-looked-for son drove up to the door. Lord Erceldonne, opening it, could hardly contain himself as he saw he was not alone. A quiet man, in black clerical clothes, sat in the carriage. “Where have you been?” said Erceldonne in a whisper almost soundless, as his son got out, “Who are you bringing here? You’re mad--to dare!” “Shut up,” returned Raimond, shaking hands as if he greeted him. “Open some windows in this musty hole; make everything look all right. This is the very man we want, and an old friend of mine,” raising his voice, “whom I’ve had hard work to find. Father Maurice,” turning quickly, “this is my father. And he is afraid you will find it rough work staying in a shooting-box like this.” “I have seen worse places,” said the man.