"There's no help for it; you must have your wits about you," he whispered. "I shall go straight on as if I had come to pay a visit to the Hold." Mr. King was not perhaps the best of men to "have his wits about him" on a sudden emergency, and almost as the last word left George's lips, Mr. Chattaway was upon them. "Good afternoon, Mr. Chattaway," said George. "Is Cris at home?" George continued his way as he spoke, brushing past Mr. Chattaway. You know what a very coward is self-consciousness. The presence of Chattaway at that ill-omened moment set them all inwardly quaking. George, the surgeon, old Canham sitting inside, and Ann peeping from the window, felt one and all as if Chattaway must divine some part of the great secret locked within their breasts. "Cris? I don't think Cris is at home," called out Chattaway. "He went out after dinner." "I am going to see," replied George, looking back. The little delay had given the doctor time to collect himself, and he strove to look and speak as much at ease as possible. He stood on the lodge step, waiting to greet Mr. Chattaway. It would never do to make believe he was not going into the lodge, as George did, for Mr. Chattaway had seen him step up to it. "How d'ye do, Mr. Chattaway? Fine weather this!" "We shall have a change before long; the glass is shifting. Anyone ill here?" continued Chattaway. "Not they, I hope!" returned the surgeon with a laugh. "I give old Canham a look in now and then, when I am passing and can spare the time, just for a dish of gossip and to ask after his rheumatism. I suppose you thought I had quite forgotten you," he added, turning to the old man, who had risen and stood leaning on his crutch, looking, if Mr. Chattaway could but have understood it, half frightened to death. "It's a long time since I was here, Mark." He sat down on the settle as he spoke, as if to intimate that he intended to take a dish of gossip then. Chattaway--ah! can he suspect? thought old Mark as he entered the lodge; a thing he did not do once in a year. Conscience does make cowards of us all--and it need not be altogether a guilty conscience to do this--and it was rendering Ann Canham as one paralysed. She would have given the whole world to leave the room, go up to Rupert, and guard as far as possible against noise; but she feared to excite suspicion. Foolish fears! Had Rupert not been there, Ann Canham would have passed in and out of the room twenty times without thinking of Mr. Chattaway. "Madam Chattaway said you were ill, I remember," said he to Mark Canham. "Fever, I understood. She said something about seeing your fever mixture at the chemist's at Barmester." Ann Canham turned hot and cold. She did not dare to even glance at her father, still less prompt him; but it so happened that, willing to spare him unnecessary worry, she had not mentioned the little episode of meeting Mrs. Chattaway at Barmester. Old Mark was cautious, however.