Marese reached The Towers about one in the morning. During his ride he had mastered his feelings; he had crushed down the superstitious presentiment which warned him that all was in vain. He had not felt so unusually nervous about this marriage for nothing. But he mastered himself. One of his maxims was never to regret the past, but to apply the mind with iron will to make the best of the present. He called the servants, naturally taking the lead, and made them tell him all they knew. Then for the first time Lady Agnes’ strange visits to “The Pot” became known; and at once the gloomiest forebodings filled the minds of the guests. She was drowned; she had fallen down “The Pot.” The idea grew and grew, till it became the one belief. Marese himself could not doubt it. It was a strange and solemn conclave they held, at that hour of the night, in the hall at The Towers, Marese standing in the midst, his face pale but composed, the guests crowding round him, the servants coming up one by one to be examined. The great clock at The Towers tolled two, and there stepped silently into the room a stranger, plainly dressed, but remarkably upright, with an air of authority—the Superintendent of police from Barnham. A silence followed his entrance. He marked it, and said that he had brought drags to search the river—was there a boat anywhere to be obtained? There was no boat. The Ise ran so swift and was so shallow at ordinary times, and lay so deep down between its banks, that no one cared to keep a boat. The nearest known was a little punt four miles down the river, where it enlarged into a small lake. A man was despatched to borrow it, and pole it up the rapid stream; he could not reach “The Pot,” work as hard as he might, under three hours. All the gentlemen and not a few of the ladies, too excited to sit quietly within, went with the Superintendent across the park to “The Pot,” and watched the drags used. The Superintendent asked them to stand back a moment while he examined the ground round the mouth of the funnel. He did so carefully; the grass had left no mark of a footstep, there was not a trace of a struggle, not a scrap of dress hanging to a twig, or a broken ornament. Then the drags were dropped down the strange funnel into the roaring water, and under the quiet stars the wedding guests gathered in a circle, watching the police as they searched the cave in vain. Neither drag nor pole could detect anything at the bottom; the light of the strongest bull’s-eye failed to show any trace that a body had fallen down that narrow crevice; no stones or earth recently dislodged, not a particle of dress or shawl here either.