hed upstairs to discover what luggage Louis had taken with him.
But apparently he had taken nothing whatever. The trunk, the valise,
and the various bags were all stacked in the empty attic, exactly as
she had placed them. He must have gone off in a moment, without any
reflection or preparation.

And when Mrs. Tams served the solitary tea, Rachel was just as idiotic
as before.

"By the way, Mrs. Tams," she began again, "did you happen to tell Mr.
Fores where I'd gone this afternoon?... You see, we'd no opportunity
to discuss anything," she added, striving once more after
verisimilitude.

"Yes'm. I told him when I took him his early cup o' tea."

"Did he ask you?"

"Now ye puzzle me, ma'am! I couldn't swear to it to save my life. But
I told him."

"What did he say?" Rachel tried to smile.

"He didna say aught."

Rachel remained alone, to objurgate Rachel. It was indeed only too
obvious from Mrs. Tams's constrained and fussy demeanour that the
old woman had divined the existence of serious trouble in the Fores
household.

III

Some time after the empty ceremony of tea, Rachel sat in state in the
parlour, dignified, self-controlled, pretending to sew, as she had
pretended to eat and drink and, afterwards, to have an important
enterprise of classifying and rearranging her possessions in the
wardrobe upstairs. Let Mrs. Tams enter ever so unexpectedly, Rachel
was a fit spectacle for her, with a new work-basket by her side on the
table, and her feet primly on a footstool, quite in the style of the
late Mrs. Maldon, and a serious and sagacious look on her face that
the fire and the gas combined to illuminate. She did not actually sew,
but the threaded needle was ready in her hand to move convincingly
at a second's notice, for Mrs. Tams was of a restless and inquisitive
disposition that night.

Apparently secure between the drawn blinds, the fire, the
Chesterfield, and the sideboard, Rachel was nevertheless ranging wide
among vast, desolate tracts of experience, and she was making singular
discoveries. For example, it was not until she was alone in the
parlour after tea that she discovered that during the whole of her
interview with Julian Maldon in the afternoon she had never regarded
him as a thief. And yet he was a thief--just as much as Louis! She had
simply forgotten that he was a thief. He did not seem to be any the
worse for being a thief. If he had shown the desire to explain to her
by word of mouth