The Mystery of the Downs | Page 8

for a few moments.
"I am glad he did not come down," she said at length. "I am glad I did not see who it was."
Again Marsland was reminded of the way in which she had greeted him at the door. Could it be that, instead of having gone to the farm for shelter with a companion, she had gone there to meet some one, and that unknown to her the person she was to meet had reached the house before her and had remained hidden upstairs?
"Did you close the front door when we left?" she asked.
"Yes. I slammed it and I heard the bolt catch. Why do you ask?"
"There is something I want to ask you," she said, at length.
"What is it?"
"I want you to promise if you can that you will not tell the police that I was at Cliff Farm tonight; I want you to promise that you will not tell any one."
"Do you think it--wise?" he asked, after a pause in which he gave consideration to the request.
"I do not want to be mixed up in it in any way," she explained. "The tragedy will give rise to a lot of talk in the place. I would not like my name to be mixed up in it."
"I quite appreciate that," he said. "And as far as it goes I would be willing to keep your name out of it. But have you considered what the effect would be if the police subsequently discovered that you had been there? That would give rise to greater talk--to talk of a still more objectionable kind."
"Yes; but how are they to discover that I was there unless you tell them?" she asked.
He laughed softly.
"They have to try to solve a more difficult problem than that without any one to tell them the solution," he said. "They have to try to find out who killed this man Lumsden--and why he was killed. There will be two or three detectives making all sorts of in-* *quiries. One of them might alight accidentally on the fact that you, like myself, had taken shelter there in the storm."
She took refuge in the privilege of her sex to place a man in the wrong by misinterpreting his motives.
"Of course, if you do not wish to do it, there is no reason why you should." She removed her hand from his arm.
He pulled her up with a sharpness which left on her mind the impression that he was a man who knew his own mind.
"Please understand that I am anxious to do the best I can for you without being absurdly quixotic about it. I am quite willing to keep your name out of it in the way you ask, but I am anxious that you should first realize the danger of the course you suggest. It seems to me that, in order to avoid the unpleasantness of allowing it to be publicly known that you shared with me the discovery of this tragedy, you are courting the graver danger which would attach to the subsequent difficulty of offering a simple and satisfactory explanation to the police of why you wanted to keep your share in the discovery an absolute secret. And you must remember that your explanation to me of how you came to the farm is rather vague. It is true that you said you went there for shelter from the storm. But you have not explained how you got into the house, and from the way you spoke to me when you opened the door it is obvious that you expected to see some one else who was not a stranger."
She came to a halt in the road in order to put a direct question to him.
"Do you think that I had anything to do with this dreadful murder? Do you think that is the reason I asked you to keep my name out of it?"
"I am quite sure that you had nothing whatever to do with the tragedy--that the discovery of the man's dead body was as great a surprise to you as it was to me."
"Thank you," she said. The emphasis of his declaration imparted a quiver to her expression of gratitude. "You are quite right about my expecting to see some one else when I opened the door," she said. "I expected to see Mr. Lumsden."
"Oh, I beg your pardon. I never thought of that." He flushed at the way in which her simple explanation had convicted him of having harboured unjust suspicions against her.
"I went to the farm to see him--I had a message for him," she continued, with seeming candour. "The storm came on just before I reached the house. I knocked, but no one came, and then I noticed the key was in the lock on the outside