My suspicion was that Clara had examined the blade thoroughly, and given him a full description of it. He _might_, however, have been at the Hall on some previous occasion, without my knowledge, and might have seen the half-drawn blade on the wall, examined it, and pushed it back into the sheath; which might have so far loosened the blade that Clara was afterwards able to draw it herself. I was all but certain by this time that it was no other than she that had laid it on my bed. But then why had she drawn it? Perhaps that I might leave proof of its identity behind me--for the carrying out of her treachery, whatever the object of it might be. But this opened a hundred questions not to be discussed, even in silent thought, in the presence of another. ‘Did you see your mother, Charley?’ I asked. ‘No, I thought it better not to trouble her. They are going to-morrow. Mary had persuaded her--why, I don’t know--to return a day or two sooner than they had intended.’ ‘I hope Brotherton will not succeed in prejudicing them against me.’ ‘I wish that were possible,’ he answered. ‘But the time for prejudice is long gone by.’ I could not believe this to be the case in respect of Mary; for I could not but think her favourably inclined to me. ‘Still,’ I said, ‘I should not like their bad opinion of me to be enlarged as well as strengthened by the belief that I had attempted to steal Sir Giles’s property. You _must_ stand my friend there, Charley.’ ‘Then you _do_ doubt me, Wilfrid?’ ‘Not a bit, you foolish fellow.’ ‘You know, I can’t enter that house again, and I don’t care about writing to my mother, for my father is sure to see it; but I will follow my mother and Mary the moment they are out of the grounds to-morrow, and soon see whether they’ve got the story by the right end.’ The evening passed with me in alternate fits of fierce indignation and profound depression, for, while I was clear to my own conscience in regard of my enemies, I had yet thrown myself bound at their feet by my foolish lie; and I all but made up my mind to leave the country, and only return after having achieved such a position--of what sort I had no more idea than the school-boy before he sets himself to build a new castle in the air--as would buttress any assertion of the facts I might see fit to make in after-years.