Maria Beccles did not reply for some time to the question.  Then she took the pins out of her hat and threw it on a chair, thus symbolising the renunciation of her intention of returning forthwith to Scotland.

“Yes, Maria,” said Lady Fenimore, with fear in her dark eyes, “we don’t doubt your word—­but, as Anthony has said, if she wasn’t with you, where was she?”

“How do I know?”

Maria Beccles pointed a lean finger—­she was a dark and shrivelled, gipsy-like creature.  “You might as well ask the canal in which she drowned herself.”

“But, my God, Anthony!” I cried, when he had got thus far, “What did you think?  What did you say?”

I realised that the old lady had her social disqualifications.  Plain-dealing is undoubtedly a virtue.  But there are several virtues which the better class of angel keeps chained up in a dog-kennel.  Of course she was acute.  A mind trained in the acrobatics of Calvinistic Theology is, within a narrow compass, surprisingly agile.  It jumped at one bound from the missing week in Althea’s life into the black water of the canal.  It was incapable, however, of appreciating the awful horror in the minds of the beholders.

“I don’t know what I said,” replied Sir Anthony, walking restlessly about my library.  “We were struck all of a heap.  As you know, we never had reason to think that the poor dear child’s death was anything but an accident.  We were not narrow-minded old idiots.  She was a dear good girl.  In a modern way she claimed her little independence.  We let her have it.  We trusted her.  We took it for granted—­you know it, Duncan, as well as I do—­that, a hot night in June—­not able to sleep—­she had stuck on a hat and wandered about the grounds, as she had often done before, and a spirit of childish adventure had tempted her, that night, to walk round the back of the town and—­and—­well, until in the dark, she stepped off the tow-path by the lock gates, into nothing—­and found the canal.  It was an accident,” he continued, with a hand on my shoulder, looking down on me in my chair.  “The inquest proved that.  I accepted it, as you know, as a visitation of God.  Edith and I sorrowed for her like cowards.  It took the war to bring us to our senses.  But, now, this damned old woman comes and upsets the whole thing.”

“But,” said I, “after all, it was only a bow at a venture on the part of the old lady.”

“I wish it were,” said he, and he handed me a letter which Maria had written to him the day after her return to Scotland.

The letter contained a pretty piece of information.  She had summarily discharged Elspeth Macrae, her confidential maid of five-and-twenty years’ standing.  Elspeth Macrae, on her own confession, had, out of love for Althea, performed the time-honoured jugglery with correspondence.  She had posted in Galloway letters which she had received, under cover, from Althea, and had forwarded letters that had arrived addressed to Althea to an accommodation address in Carlisle.  So have sentimental serving-maids done since the world began.