"Very well," was her indifferent reply, although she wondered if he had missed the key of the smaller gate. "Will I come and say good-night to you as usual at ten?" Alpenny nodded in an absent way, and walked into his counting-house with his hands behind him, and his form more bent than usual. Beatrice watched him cross the smooth sward, and then went to sit down in the parlour and meditate. In some way, which she could scarcely define, she scented a mystery. The episode of the telegram, the hasty departure of Durban, the proposal of marriage, all these things hinted--as she thought--at schemes against her peace of mind. And then, again, the words of Vivian Paslow. Those were indeed mysterious, and she was anxious to know what they meant. Finally, the hint that Alpenny had given as to Vivian having committed crimes, alarmed the girl. She felt that Alpenny was trying to inveigle Paslow into some trap, and from his words it was plain that he would stop at nothing to prevent the young man declaring the passion he felt for the girl. Also, from another hint, it would seem that the miser held--as, indeed, he had plainly stated--"Vivian in the hollow of his hand." These thoughts made Beatrice very uncomfortable, the more so as never before had any mystery come into her life. Hitherto it had been serene and uneventful, one day being exactly the same as another. But with the visit of Vivian on that afternoon everything had changed, for since he had heard those mysterious words, Alpenny had not been himself. In some queer way he had forwarded a telegram, and in a hurry he had sent Durban to London, which he had not done for months past. Undoubtedly something sinister was in the wind, and Beatrice shivered with a vague apprehension of dread. It certainly might have been the weather which made her feel so ill at ease, for the hot day had ended in an even hotter evening. The air was close, the sky was clouded, and there was not a breath of wind to stir the leaves of the surrounding trees. Ever and again a flicker of lightning would leap across the sky--summer lightning which portended storm and rain. Beatrice, trying to breathe freely in the suffocating air, wished that the storm would come to clear the atmosphere. There was electricity in the dry air, and she felt as uncomfortable as a cat which has its hair smoothed the wrong way. On some such night as this must Lady Macbeth have received Duncan, and Nature hinted at a repetition of the storm which took place when the guileless king was done to death in the shambles.