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On the threshold stood a man about to ring, who let his hand drop from the bell-pull. "Why, Tedham!" I shouted, joyfully. The light from the hall-lamp struck full on his face; we all involuntarily shrank back, except the girl, who looked, not at the man before her, but first at her aunt and then at her uncle, timorously, and murmured some inaudible question.
"Mr. Carr is waiting to see you, my lord," said Hedges, meeting them in the passage. "He is in the dining-room." "Mr. Carr! Now!" The hall-lamp shone full on his face as he spoke. He had been momentarily forgetting care; was speaking gaily to his wife as they entered. She saw the change that came over it; the look of fear, of apprehension, that replaced its smile.
Here the examination-in-chief ended, and Mr. Loram sat down with an audible sigh of relief. Miss Dobbs was about to step down from the witness-box when Mr. Heath rose to cross-examine. "Did you see Mr. Bellingham in a good light?" he asked. "Pretty good. It was dark outside, but the hall-lamp was alight." "Kindly look at this" here a small object was passed across to the witness.
In another moment, I had crept in by the window; and chuckling at my own cleverness, and the great moral lesson I was about to teach, I was stuffing my pockets with the plate. While thus engaged, the opening of a door in the hall above alarmed me; and afraid of the failure of my plan, I stepped lightly up the stair, which was partially lighted by the hall-lamp.
But he had much reason, after that, to thank God that he did not succeed. He had just got from under the gaze of the hall-lamp, and stood a minute in the darkness waiting for Kitty, when he felt Mr. Holbrook's hand on his arm, and heard his kind, quiet voice: "Edward, Mrs. Holbrook has some little business to transact' with Kitty to-night; shall I walk with you?"
"You forget the hall-lamp!" said Ian. "Ah, yes, to be sure! I had forgotten!" answered Alister. "To tell the truth, I thought, when I took his shilling, he would never know me from Nebuchadnezzar: that is the one thing I am ashamed of in the affair I did in the dark what perhaps I should not have done in the daylight! I don't mean I would not have carried him and his bag too!
About a week after these measures had been taken, one night, as the superintendent of the watch, who had been inspecting the lower dormitory in the Batiment-Neuf, was about to drop his chestnut in the box this was the means adopted to make sure that the watchmen performed their duties punctually; every hour a chestnut must be dropped into all the boxes nailed to the doors of the dormitories a watchman looked through the peep-hole of the dormitory and beheld Brujon sitting on his bed and writing something by the light of the hall-lamp.
What a dismal home-coming! What can I do to make amends? But good comes out of evil, you see, for in no other possible way could I have been inside to welcome you when you entered. They stayed in the hall in the dark some time, these wet and foolish young people. Then Frank struck a match, and tried to light the hall-lamp. There was no oil in it.
Her candle-stick had fallen from her benumbed hand; but the hall-lamp revealed what her finger was quivering and pointing at: a dark fluid trickling slowly out into the lobby from beneath the bedroom door. It was blood.
Presently the servant returned and gave him a little packet. The wax of the seal was still warm. He opened it where he stood, and by the light of Miss Macgregor's hall-lamp read the couple of lines it contained: "I cannot come, but I send you all the money I have. I pray God you may be in time. Yours, JUDITH." There were two sovereigns and some silver.
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