ght have done. I can not
positively say--"

"Ah, that explains everything. No doubt mother heard you and was
frightened. I see it all now. Natt, drive on--cold journey--good-night."

Greta felt her face burn in the darkness. Before she had time or
impulse to reply, they were rolling away toward home.

At intervals her ear caught the sound of suppressed titters from the
driver's seat. Natt was chuckling to himself with great apparent
satisfaction. Since the fire at the mill he had been putting two and two
together, and he was now perfectly confident as to the accuracy of his
computation. When folks said that Paul had been at the fire he laughed
derisively, because he knew that an hour before he had left him at the
station. But an idea works in a brain like Natt's pretty much as the hop
ferments. When it goes to the bottom it leaves froth and bubbles at the
top. Natt knew that there was some grave quarrel between the brothers.
He also knew that there were two ways to the station and two ways back
to Newlands--one through the town, the other under Latrigg. Mr. Paul
might have his own reasons for pretending to go to London, and also his
own reasons for not going. Natt had left him stepping into the station
at the town entrance. But what was to prevent him from going out again
at the entrance from Latrigg? Of course that was what he had done. And
he had never been out of the county. Deary me, how blind folks were, to
be sure! Thus Natt's wise head chuckled and clucked.

At one moment Natt twisted his sapient and facetious noddle over his
shoulder to where Brother Peter sat huddled into a hump and in gloomy
silence. "Mercy me, Peter!" he cried, in an affrighted whisper, and with
a mighty tragical start, "and is that thee? Dusta know I thowt it were
thy ghost?"

"Don't know as it's not--dragging a body frae bed a cold neet like
this," mumbled Peter, numbed up to his tongue, but still warm enough
there.

CHAPTER IX.

Hugh Ritson was content that Greta should think she had been the victim
of a delusion. He was not unwilling that she should be tortured by
suggestions of the supernatural. If she concluded that Paul had deceived
her as to his departure from Newlands, he would not be unlikely to
foster the delusion. The one thing of all others which Hugh Ritson was
anxious to prevent was that Greta should be led to draw the purely
matter-of-fact inference that when she thought she saw Paul she had
really seen anothe