The thought of Abel came as a demand to her justice.  Her knowledge, amounting to a conviction, required action.  The nature of the action she did not know, but something urged her to reach him if she could.  For she believed him mad.  Great torture of spirit had overtaken her under her loss; but upon this extreme grief, ugly and incessant, obtruded the thought of Abel, the secret of his present refuge and the impulse to approach him.  Her personal suffering established rather than shook her own high standards.  She had promised the boy never to tell anybody of the haunt he had shown her under the roof in the old store at West Haven; and if most women might now have forgotten such a promise, Estelle did not.  But she very strenuously argued against the spiritual impulse to seek him, for every physical instinct rose against doing so.  To do this was surely not required of her, for whereunto would it lead?  What must be the result of any such meeting?  It might be dreadful; it could not fail to be futile.  Yet all mental effort to escape the task proved vain.  Her very grief edged her old, austere, chivalrous acceptance of duty.  She felt that justice called her to this ordeal, and she went—­with no fixed purpose save to see him and urge him to surrender himself for his own peace if he could understand.  No personal fear touched her reflections.  She might have welcomed fear in these unspeakable moments of her life, for she was little enamoured of living after Raymond Ironsyde died.  The thought of death for herself had not been distasteful at that time.

She went fearlessly, when all slept and her going and coming would not be observed.  She left her home at a moonless midnight, took candle and matches, dressed in her stoutest clothes and walked over North Hill towards Bridport.  But at the eastern shoulder of the downs she descended through a field and struck the road again just at the fork where Raymond had perished.

Then she struck into the West Haven way and soon slipped under the black mass of the old store.  The night was cloudy and still.  No wind blew and the sigh of the sea beneath the shelving beaches close at hand, had sunk to a murmur.  West Haven lay lost in darkness.  The old store had been searched, as many other empty buildings, for the fugitive; but he was not specially associated with this place, save in the mind of Estelle.  The police had hunted it carefully, no more, and she guessed that his eerie under the roof, only reached by a somewhat perilous climb through a broken window, would not be discovered.

She remembered also that there were some students of Raymond’s murder who did not associate Abel with it.  Such held that only accident and coincidence had made him run away on the night of Ironsyde’s end.  They argued that in these cases the obvious always proved erroneous, and the theory most transparently rational seldom led the way to the truth.

But she had never doubted about that.  It seemed already a commonplace of knowledge, a lifetime old, that Abel had destroyed his father, and that he must be insane to have ruined his own life in this manner.