"Certainly her manner is suggestive," assented Ella. "But look at her distress: how shall we get anything more from her?"
"That is just the point we have to consider," said Conroy.
"Of one thing I am persuaded--that she would never tell me what is not true."
"Under ordinary circumstances, no; I believe that. But she may be forced into it by Aaron and the rest of the conspirators."
"Oh, Edward! Conspirators! Poor old Aaron!"
"Well, my dear, time will show. If that old man has not a weighty secret on his back, tell me that my name is not Conroy."
For a few days, after this, things went on at the Hall in their usual state of quiet monotony: perhaps we might say _dis_-quiet, could the minds of some of its inmates have been read. Old Dorothy went about her duties in a dazed manner: but nothing more was said to her.
Gradually, finding herself let alone, the scare, which seemed to have taken up its abode permanently on her face, began to leave it.
"The young mistress must see that I can tell nothing," she told herself, "and she won't frighten me again by asking me to. Why should innocent folks suffer for the guilty? If that Dexter woman and that horrid Jago had but never come anigh this miserable house!"
Late one afternoon, when the sun had set and the dusk of the January evening was drawing on, there was heard a soft knock at the outer door, which opened from the kitchen corridor into the shrubbery at the back of the Hall.
Dorothy was in her own room, adjoining the kitchen, the door between them standing partly open. She had put down the grey stocking of her husband, which she had been mending, and sat in the firelight, doing nothing, save idly watching Phemie, who was preparing her tea in the kitchen, and wondering whether Aaron would be very late. For Aaron and the coachman had driven off to Nullington in the dog-cart, to despatch some matter of business for Miss Winter.
"Wasn't that a knock at the shrubbery-door, Phemie?" asked Dorothy, raising her voice.
"Well, I thought I heard something," replied Phemie, the only servant at the moment in the kitchen. "I'll see directly, ma'am. It's only Jem."
Before Phemie could finish buttering the muffin she had been toasting, the gentle knock was heard at the door a second time. Phemie ran along the short passage and opened it. Expecting to see only the gardener's boy, she started back in some alarm at sight of the strange figure confronting her. Standing between the two lights, one ruddy and homelike that streamed out of the kitchen doorway, the other pallid and ghastly that was dying slowly in the western sky, Phemie saw a tall and fierce-looking woman, tawny-skinned, and with bright black eyes. A scarlet kerchief was bound round the tangle of her black hair; a faded scarlet shawl was draped round her figure and knotted behind. Thick hoops of gold were in her ears; rings glittered on her yellow fingers. A gipsy fortune-teller without any doubt, as Phemie, after the first moment of surprise, at once felt assured. She had seen women attired somewhat like her in the country lanes round about. In her astonishment she did not speak. But the stranger did.