“Ah!” I cried. “Go, while I watch, and fetch the others. They must come--they must see this--Valombroso will know what to do. Go, do you hear? I am not afraid any longer. Do you not understand what he was to me?” CHAPTER XXX. HARD PRESSED It was on a dreary wet morning, laden with the very spirit of depression, that I led my little party of three across the fields to the Lone Farm. We had talked, or slept, out the night at the “Black Dog” in Market Grazing; and now, in grim fulfilment of the purpose which had brought us so far, were advancing to the assault of the inner abode of that mystery, whose final ramification had ended for us under the waterfall in far-away Piedmont. We numbered, besides myself, Mr Shapter and the two detectives. Johnny and Geoletti had stopped by the way in London, to provide us with the necessary correspondents in that prescriptive centre to all such operations. We had hardly rested in our flight back from the Continent, since the finding of the inquest held upon those pitiful remains had supplied us with the _argumentum ad rem_ for procuring the extradition of Mr Mark Dalston; but, quick as we had travelled, the news of our presumptive mission had preceded us. For many reasons we should have preferred for the present to have throttled all journalistic gossip; but where was the lethal spot to be found in that myriad-necked Hydra? The story, or a travesty of it, leaked out and ran faster than we could, and was threatening us already, on our arrival in London, with a most undesired fame. The absurdest surmises were rife; the most ingenious inventions drawn upon to provide them. I have no time nor patience to stop and retail a fraction of the nonsense talked by the newspapers. The serious thing to us in it all was that it brought into a full glare of notoriety a case which, in its first processes, it was of the utmost importance should be kept secret. Signor Valombroso was, of course, as cutting as a whip upon the paradox involved. “Why do you not also publish portrait cards of your London detectives, with their character parts included?” he asked. “It would give the poor criminal yet one other chance.” He would have proposed a newspaper censorship as the remedy. But it was certainly aggravating. If it was true that Mr Dalston, having got wind somehow--perhaps through Mother Carey--of the trend of my inquiries, and being baffled in his designs on his victim, had already slipped into hiding, it was hardly probable that this public exposure and _esclandre_ would bring him out of it. The puzzling thing was that he should have left so vexatious a witness behind him at the Lone Farm; but, as to that, it had to be borne in mind that he was presumably unaware of her treachery to himself. In any case, hither had been our obvious direction from the moment of our landing.