o less than
his activity of body, had not ceased to minister to my amazement. He set
the crown upon it in the council we held on our return. The free-traders
had certainly secured the Master, though whether dead or alive we were
still left to our conjectures; the rain would, long before day, wipe out
all marks of the transaction; by this we must profit. The Master had
unexpectedly come after the fall of night; it must now be given out he
had as suddenly departed before the break of day; and, to make all this
plausible, it now only remained for me to mount into the man's chamber,
and pack and conceal his baggage. True, we still lay at the discretion
of the traders; but that was the incurable weakness of our guilt.

I heard him, as I said, with wonder, and hastened to obey. Mr. and Mrs.
Henry were gone from the hall; my lord, for warmth's sake, hurried to
his bed; there was still no sign of stir among the servants, and as I
went up the tower stair, and entered the dead man's room, a horror of
solitude weighed upon my mind. To my extreme surprise, it was all in the
disorder of departure. Of his three portmanteaus, two were already
locked; a third lay open and near full. At once there flashed upon me
some suspicion of the truth. The man had been going, after all; he had
but waited upon Crail, as Crail waited upon the wind; early in the night
the seamen had perceived the weather changing; the boat had come to give
notice of the change and call the passenger aboard, and the boat's crew
had stumbled on him lying in his blood. Nay, and there was more behind.
This pre-arranged departure shed some light upon his inconceivable
insult of the night before; it was a parting shot, hatred being no
longer checked by policy. And, for another thing, the nature of that
insult, and the conduct of Mrs. Henry, pointed to one conclusion, which
I have never verified, and can now never verify until the great
assize--the conclusion that he had at last forgotten himself, had gone
too far in his advances, and had been rebuffed. It can never be
verified, as I say; but as I thought of it that morning among his
baggage, the thought was sweet to me like honey.

Into the open portmanteau I dipped a little ere I closed it. The most
beautiful lace and linen, many suits of those fine plain clothes in
which he loved to appear; a book or two, and those of the best, Caesar's
"Commentaries," a volume of Mr. Hobbes, the "Henriade" of M. de
Voltaire, a book upo