He leaned against the tree for a while, eating the food he had brought with him from the inn, and washing it down with liquor from his flask. He was summing up the situation, and wondering what to make of it, for it seemed more than probable that he would spend a night in the open woods. Captain Grylls had most assuredly ridden into Thorn, and he suspected Captain Grylls to be his father’s creature. He remembered also that gathering in Hortense’s house, and the hints his father had thrown out to him. Anne Purcell might be in the secret of some intrigue; Thorn was her house and the very place for a refuge in case of need. Then there were the white hands he had seen at the window, those hands that had set all manner of passionate surmises afire within his brain. Yet what a suspicious, speculative fool he might prove himself to be! It was humanly possible and reasonable that the couple down yonder should have a daughter. Darkness had fallen, and, taking his cloak, he cast it over his horse’s loins. Then after petting and fondling the beast as though to persuade him to patience, he started out from the beech thicket over the grass-land toward the house. He had come within a hundred yards of the moat when he saw a beam of light steal out suddenly from the black mass of the ruin. It came and went, mounting higher each moment, for some one was carrying a lantern up the tower stair, the light shooting out, as it passed, through the narrow squints in the wall. John Gore gained one of the thorn-trees close to the moat and took cover there, about twenty yards from the gate. An upper window in the tower shone out suddenly, a yellow oblong against the blackness of the ivied walls. The light remained steady. John Gore heard the sound of a rough, bullying voice that would have rasped any man’s fighting instinct and made him knit his muscles as though to take an enemy by the throat. For a moment there was silence. Then the voice came down to him again, harsh, threatening, with sharp, fierce words that sounded like oaths. Moreover, there was the sound as of a blow given, and then—shrill and full of strange anguish—a woman’s cry. John Gore straightened where he stood, his upper lip stiffening and his teeth pressing grimly against each other. With the shadow of the thorn-tree over him, he stood there listening, the silence of the night about him, and from the lighted window high up in the tower a faint sound coming like the sound of some one weeping. A dull murmur of voices struck upon his ear. Then the light died away suddenly, the window melted into the darkness, and he heard the rough closing of a door. The light came down the stair again, flashing out where the squints opened, with a muffled thud of feet and the faint growl of voices. But John Gore, as he stood under the thorn-tree, could still hear the sound as of weeping coming from the shadows of the great tower. XXX