ed was unpressed: no clothes about:
nothing to show that he had been there that night. Sir Austin felt
vaguely apprehensive. Has he gone to my room to await me? thought the
father's heart. Something like a tear quivered in his arid eyes as he
meditated and hoped this might be so. His own sleeping-room faced that
of his son. He strode to it with a quick heart. It was empty. Alarm
dislodged anger from his jealous heart, and dread of evil put a thousand
questions to him that were answered in air. After pacing up and down his
room he determined to go and ask the boy Thompson, as he called Ripton,
what was known to him.

The chamber assigned to Master Ripton Thompson was at the northern
extremity of the passage, and overlooked Lobourne and the valley to the
West. The bed stood between the window and the door. Six Austin
found the door ajar, and the interior dark. To his surprise, the boy
Thompson's couch, as revealed by the rays of his lamp, was likewise
vacant. He was turning back when he fancied he heard the sibilation of
a whispering in the room. Sir Austin cloaked the lamp and trod silently
toward the window. The heads of his son Richard and the boy Thompson
were seen crouched against the glass, holding excited converse together.
Sir Austin listened, but he listened to a language of which he possessed
not the key. Their talk was of fire, and of delay: of expected agrarian
astonishment: of a farmer's huge wrath: of violence exercised upon
gentlemen, and of vengeance: talk that the boys jerked out by fits, and
that came as broken links of a chain impossible to connect. But they
awake curiosity. The baronet condescended to play the spy upon his son.

Over Lobourne and the valley lay black night and innumerable stars.

"How jolly I feel!" exclaimed Ripton, inspired by claret; and then,
after a luxurious pause--"I think that fellow has pocketed his guinea,
and cut his lucky."

Richard allowed a long minute to pass, during which the baronet waited
anxiously for his voice, hardly recognizing it when he heard its altered
tones.

"If he has, I'll go; and I'll do it myself."

"You would?" returned Master Ripton. "Well, I'm hanged!--I say, if you
went to school, wouldn't you get into rows! Perhaps he hasn't found the
place where the box was stuck in. I think he funks it. I almost wish
you hadn't done it, upon my honour--eh? Look there! what was that? That
looked like something.--I say! do you think we shall ever be found out?