ttled off down the silent
street, leaving on Barrant's mind a receding impression of a startled red
face staring after them from the footpath. The wagonette jolted round a
corner, and ten minutes later stopped at the entrance of the hotel where
Mrs. Pendleton was staying.

CHAPTER XV

When Barrant learnt from the trembling lips of Mrs. Pendleton that she had
not seen her niece since that morning, his first step was to get Sisily's
full description, and call up Dawfield on the hotel telephone with
instructions to have all the railway stations between Penzance and London
warned to look out for her. That was a necessary precaution, but it did
not need Dawfield's hesitating information about time tables to convince
him that it was almost futile. The later of the two trains by which Sisily
might have fled from Cornwall had reached London and discharged its
passengers somewhere about the time that Mr. Peter Portgartha, in the
depth of the rumbling wagonette, was paying his tribute to shrinking
female modesty as exhibited on Mousehole rocks.

After doing this Barrant returned to the empty lounge, where Mrs.
Pendleton sat in partial darkness with tearful face. All the other guests
had retired, and a lurking porter yawned longingly in the passage, waiting
for an opportunity to put out the last of the lights and get to bed.

In the first shock of Barrant's violent apparition and angry questions,
Mrs. Pendleton had tried, in a bewildered way, to insist that her niece
had not left her room on the previous night. But now, in her troubled
consideration of the new strange turn of events surrounding her brother's
death, she saw that she might have been deceived on this point. Barrant,
for his part, had not the slightest doubt of it when he heard that her
belief rested on no stronger foundation than Sisily's early withdrawal
from the dining-room on the plea of fatigue, and the fact that her bedroom
door was locked when Mrs. Pendleton returned from her own visit to Flint
House. Sisily's subsequent flight eliminated any uncertainty about that,
and established beyond reasonable doubt her identity with the silent girl
who had entered the returning wagonette at the cross-roads. The
coincidence of those two facts had a terrible significance. Barrant had no
doubt that Sisily had gone to her own room early in order to find an
opportunity to pay a secret visit to her home, for a purpose which now
seemed to stand sinisterly revealed by