y
Joan would be. It would be time enough to lift her to hope when it was
certain that the hope would not crumble away to dust.

Joan was at that moment lying on her bed in the darkness of her room,
her face towards the moonlit garden, and such a terror of the ordeal to
be faced the next Monday in her thoughts as turned her cold and sent her
heart fluttering into her throat. Mario Escobar had been taken away that
morning. The news had reached Rackham, as it had reached every other
house in the country-side. Joan knew of it, and she felt soiled and
humiliated beyond endurance as she thought upon her association with the
spy.

The picture of the room crowded with witnesses, and people whom she
knew, and strangers, whilst she gave the evidence which would turn their
liking for her into contempt and suspicion would fade away from before
her eyes, and the summer afternoon on Duncton Hill glow in its place.
She had bidden Hillyard look at the Weald of Sussex, that he might carry
the smell of its soil, the aspect of its blooms and dark woodlands and
brown cottages away with him as a treasure to which he could secretly
turn like a miser to his gold; and she herself, with them ever before
her eyes, had forgotten them altogether. To sink back into the rank and
file--how fine she had thought it, and how little she had heeded it! Now
she had got to pay for her heedlessness, and she buried her face in her
pillows and lay shivering.

Meanwhile, in the dining-room downstairs, Millie Splay, Sir Chichester
and Harry Luttrell gathered about Martin at the table whilst he ate cold
beef and drank a pint of champagne.

"I went up to London to see some one on the editorial staff of the
_Harpoon_," Martin explained. "There were two questions I wanted answers
for, if I could get them. You see, according to McKerrel--and you, Sir
Chichester, say that he is a capable man--Stella Croyle died at one in
the morning."

"Yes," Sir Chichester agreed.

"_About_ one," Harry Luttrell corrected, with the exactness of the
soldierly mind.

"'About' will do," Martin rejoined. "For newspapers go to press early
nowadays. The _Harpoon_ would have been made up, and most of the
editorial staff would have gone home an hour--yes, actually an
hour--before Mrs. Croyle died here at Rackham in Sussex. Yet the news is
in that very issue. How did that happen? How did the news reach the
office of the _Harpoon_ an hour before the event occurred?"

"Yes, that is wh