“You were upstairs with your master?  And did you hear nothing?  A piercing shriek that rang through the house;—­you must surely have heard it, both of you.”

Martha shook her head resolutely.

“Not me, mum; I didn’t hear a sound.  The kitchen-door was shut all the time Sarah was away, and I was busy at work, and thinking of nothing but my work.  I wasn’t upon the listen, as you may say.”

The kitchen was at the extreme end of the house, remote from that direction whence the unexplainable cry seemed to have come.

“It is most extraordinary,” Ellen said gravely, perplexed beyond all measure.  “But you, Sarah; if you were upstairs with your master, you must surely have heard that shriek; it seemed to come from upstairs.”

“Did master hear it?” asked the girl deliberately.

“He says not.”

“Then how should I, mum?  No, mum, I didn’t hear nothink; I can take my Bible oath of that.”

“I don’t want any oaths; I only want to know the meaning of this business.  There would have been no harm in your screaming.  You might just as well speak the truth about it.”

“Lor, mum, but it warn’t me,” answered Sarah Batts with an injured look.  “Whatever could go to put it in your head as it was me?”

“It must have been one or other of you two girls.  There’s no other woman in the house; and as you were upstairs, it seems more likely to have been you.  However, there’s no use talking any more about it.  Only we both heard the scream, didn’t we, Mrs. Tadman?”

“I should think we did, indeed,” responded the widow with a vehement shudder.  “My flesh is all upon the creep at this very moment.  I don’t think I ever had such a turn in my life.”

They went back to the parlour, leaving the two servants still sitting by the fire; Sarah Batts with that look of injured innocence fixed upon her wooden countenance, Martha Holden cheerfully employed in the construction of her Sunday cap.  In the parlour the two men were both standing by the table, the stranger with his back to the women as they entered, Stephen Whitelaw facing him.  The former seemed to have been counting something, but stopped abruptly as the women came into the room.

There was a little heap of bank-notes lying on the table.  Stephen snatched them up hastily, and thrust them in a bundle into his waistcoat-pocket; while the stranger put a strap round a bulky red morocco pocket-book with a more deliberate air, as of one who had nothing to hide from the world.

That guilty furtive air of Stephen’s, and, above all, that passage of money between the two men, confirmed Mrs. Tadman in her notion that Wyncomb Farm was going to change hands.  She resumed her seat by the fire with a groan, and accepted Ellen’s offer of a glass of spirits-and-water with a doleful shake of her head.

“Didn’t I tell you so?” she whispered, as Mrs. Whitelaw handed her the comforting beverage.