“Half-past,” said Morris, filling his glass again.  “You expect him then, don’t you?”

“Mills is not always very punctual,” said Mr. Taynton.

For the next quarter of an hour the two sat with hardly the interchange of a word.  From outside came the swift steady hiss of the rain on to the shrubs in the garden, and again the clock chimed.  Morris who at first had sat very quiet had begun to fidget and stir in his chair; occasionally when he happened to notice it, he drank off the port with which Mr. Taynton hospitably kept his glass supplied.  Sometimes he relit a cigarette only to let it go out again.  But when the clock struck he got up.

“I wonder what has happened,” he said.  “Can he have missed his train?  What time ought he to have got in?”

“He was to have got to Falmer,” said Mr. Taynton with a little emphasis on the last word, “at a quarter to seven.  He spoke of walking from there.”

Morris looked at him with a furtive sidelong glance.

“Why, I—­I might have met him there,” he said.  “I went up there again after I left you to tell Sir Richard you would call to-morrow.”

“You saw nothing of him?” asked the lawyer.

“No, of course not.  Otherwise—­There was scarcely a soul on the road; the storm was coming up.  But he would go by the downs, would he not?”

“The path over the downs doesn’t branch off for a quarter of a mile below Falmer station,” said Mr. Taynton.

The minutes ticked on till ten.  Then Morris went to the door.

“I shall go round to his rooms to see if he is there,” he said.

“There is no need,” said his host, “I will telephone.”

The instrument hung in a corner of the room, and with very little delay, Mills’s servant was rung up.  His master had not yet returned, but he had said that he should very likely be late.

“And he made an appointment with you for half-past nine?” asked Morris again.

“Yes.  I cannot think what has happened to detain him.”

Morris went quickly to the door again.

“I believe it is all a trick,” he said, “and you don’t want me to meet him.  I believe he is in his rooms the whole time.  I shall go and see.”

Before Mr. Taynton could stop him he had opened the front-door and banged it behind him, and was off hatless and coatless through the pouring perpendicular rain.

Mr. Taynton ran to the door, as if to stop him, but Morris was already halfway down the street, and he went upstairs to the drawing-room.  Morris was altogether unlike himself; this discovery of Mills’s treachery seemed to have changed his nature.  Violent and quick he always was, but to-night he was suspicious, he seemed to distrust Mr. Taynton himself.  And, a thing which his host had never known him do before, he had drunk in that half hour when they sat waiting, close on a bottle of port.