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Aubrey Mannering went through the whole five months without a scratch. He came back with a D.S.O. and a Staff appointment for a short Christmas leave, everybody, except his father, turning out to welcome him as the local hero. Then, for a time, he went to Aldershot as the head of an Officers' School there, and was able to come down occasionally to Chetworth or Mannering.
While he was whistling shrilly for the waiter, as if he had been one of his collie dogs, Mannering looked round him, and could hardly conceive how a gentleman of a liberal profession and good society should choose such a scene for social indulgence. Besides the miserable entrance, the house itself seemed paltry and half ruinous.
The houses on each side of the lane were so close that the neighbours might have shaken hands with each other from the different sides, and occasionally the space between was traversed by wooden galleries, and thus entirely closed up. The stair, the scale-stair, was not well cleaned; and on entering the house Mannering was struck with the narrowness and meanness of the wainscotted passage.
My uncle, the bishop, would have had me in orders, and offered me a living my uncle, the merchant, would have put me into a counting-house, and proposed to give me a share in the thriving concern of Mannering and Marshall, in Lombard' Street So, between these two stools, or rather these two soft, easy, well-stuffed chairs of divinity and commerce, my unfortunate person slipped down, and pitched upon a dragoon saddle.
His words passed unheeded. His name, very softly but very distinctly, had been announced. He had no option but to pass into the room and play the cards which fate and his friend had dealt him. Borrowdean rose to greet his friend. Mannering, not knowing who his hostess might be, and feeling absolutely no curiosity concerning her, confined his attention wholly to the man whom he had come to seek.
"You used not to underrate me," she murmured, with a glance towards the mirror. "There is no other man like Mannering," he said. "He abhors any form of deceit. He would forgive a murderer, but never a liar." "My dear Leslie," she said, "as a friend and a relative " "Neither counts," he interrupted. "I am a politician." She sat quite still, looking away from him.
'Now I think, said the Colonel, 'that the most mysterious part of the business is, that Miss Julia Mannering, who must have known her father's anxiety about the fate of this young man Brown, or Bertram, as we must now call him, should have met him when Hazlewood's accident took place, and never once mentioned to her father a word of the matter, but suffered the search to proceed against this young gentleman as a suspicious character and assassin.
Lord Redford said. "I will go and find my man. He may as well take you to the station in the car." Berenice smiled at Mannering luminously through the shadowy lights. "Dear friend," she said, "I am delighted that you are going. Our little time here has been delightful, but we had reached its limit. I like to think that you are going back into the thick of it. Don't be faint-hearted, Lawrence.
The westerly sun was coming strongly into the library, and shone full on the face and figure of the Squire's new secretary as she stood in the door-way. He expected an apology for an absence just five minutes over the two hours; but she offered none. 'Pamela asked me to tell you, Mr. Mannering, that tea was ready under the verandah.
The next moment Mannering was torn with poignant remorse that, under the sudden shock of that name, he should have spoken at last after three years to this dying lad. Crime added to crime! 'Don't think of it any more, Desmond, he said hurriedly, raising himself and laying his hand on his brother's. 'I oughtn't to have told you. But Desmond showed no answering agitation.
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