"Why," replied Miss Englefield, "'tis a long story. At this inn, yesterday afternoon, a maid brought me a letter scrawled by Jenny Mullen, who used to serve at the Hall. It seems she is now attached to a gang of rogues that were hired to make trouble for me at this inn last night. So she warned me in secret to leave quietly. She begged me to say nothing to the landlord or the watch, lest her companions might be caught. So I went on and lay at Thatcham, and that is how Wilson happened to see you galloping hither this morning. Poor Jenny promised to keep the rascals drinking in the tap-room, so they should not learn of my departure, and she must have kept her promise." "Thank the Lord, she must have!" said Sir Hilary. "But how the devil did they know you were going to lodge here last night?" "Why, my girl, Sukey, confessed this morning that in Bath she made the acquaintance of a so-called captain, to whom she told the plan we had arranged for our journey. It seems from Jenny's letter that the rogues were to carry me off to a country-seat near Whitchurch in Hampshire; their employer--odious beast--was to lie last night at Hungerford, and follow to-day to Whitchurch." "Zounds! You shall tell me all about it, Sis, on the way home, and we'll see what's to be done. Come away from this inn! It seems there's been the devil to pay here, in more matters than one. Good day, sir!" Sir Hilary thereupon led his sister quickly out, with barely a thought of the apparent absence of Squire Bullcott, who indeed might have slipped off while the baronet was engrossed with his sister. The Squire now rose into view, very red and very much perturbed. He glanced first at his man and the landlord, who both had been keeping in the background during Miss Englefield's presence, then at Dick, who still guarded the bedchamber door. "Then, since it ain't his sister, by God, it must be my wife!" whined Bullcott, who, like many another person capable of doing any wrong, was quick to whimper on supposing himself injured. "I'll expose her, I'll kill her, that will I! Landlord, send for constables! Oh, the faithless woman, and the vile seducer! To think a gentleman can't go off to attend to--a little business, but his wife must take a dirty, low advantage of his absence, to run off with a base-born rascal! Send for constables, landlord, to force a way into that room!" "The landlord well knows," put in Dick, thinking of another ruse of Catherine de St. Valier's in Quebec, "that there is no lady in this room. Why, if a lady had been there, don't you suppose she'd have gone out long ago by the other door" (Dick remembered here that the other door was locked and the key in his own hand), "or by the window, from which even a woman could easily descend by the trellis to the garden?"