Lord Widmore, looking upon him with approval, decided to admit him into his confidence. As a result, he learned for the first time of the existence of Hildebrand Ross. Until that moment no one had told him that the person supposedly sent by Lady Ennerdale to escort her sister on the journey had been other than a servant. He now discovered that Hester had gone away with an unknown young gentleman of undoubted gentility but suspicious aspect, and exclaimed: “She has eloped!”

But Mr. Whyteleafe did not think that Hester had eloped. Mr. Ross, although sufficiently depraved to utter unblushing lies to a man whose cloth should have commanded his respect, was scarcely of an age to contemplate marriage with a lady approaching her thirtieth year. Mr. Ross, he feared, was no more than a go-between.

Lady Widmore, laughing in a very vulgar way, asked who the deuce was there for Mr. Ross to go between, but she was not attended to. By rapid stages Mr. Ross became an infernal agent, employed either by a secret and obviously ineligible lover, or by a daring kidnapper. Lady Widmore, declaring that she was in stitches, said that any kidnapper who thought to wring a groat out of a family that had not a feather to fly with must be so bottleheaded that even such a goosecap as Hester would be able to escape from his clutches. In her opinion, Hester herself, more sly than any of them had suspected, had employed Mr. Ross to assist her to slip away from Brancaster without exciting surprise or opposition. She recommended her husband to subject his butler to a rigorous inquisition. If anyone knew what kind of an undergame Hester was engaged in, she said, he might lay his life that one was Cliffe, whose maudlin affection for Hester had often put her ladyship out of all patience.

Lord Widmore failed to elicit any information from Cliffe, but Mr. Whyteleafe was more successful. Cliffe, already anxious and more than a little doubtful of the wisdom of his having abetted Hester, crumbled under the powerful exhortations of the chaplain. He was brought to realize that his mistress’s reputation, nay, even her life, perhaps, was at stake, and, weeping, he gave up the only piece of information he had. He told Mr. Whyteleafe that he had recognized the post-boy in charge of the chaise that had borne Lady Hester away as one of the lads employed at the Crown Inn at St. Ives.

From then onward Mr. Whyteleafe assumed command. In a manner calculated to convince the trembling butler that he had aided Lady Hester to commit an indiscretion which must plunge her entire family into a ruinous scandal, he laid a strict charge of silence upon Cliffe. Almost as impressively he pointed out to Lord Widmore that no whisper of the affair must be allowed to reach the ears of any but themselves. Together he and his lordship would discover, at St. Ives, the destination of that post-chaise; together they would track down the fugitive. No coachman or postilion should go with them: they would set forth alone, and in the curricle which the Earl kept at Brancaster for his use when in Cambridgeshire. “And I,” added Mr. Whyteleafe, recollecting that Lord Widmore was a very indifferent whip, “will drive it!”

Meanwhile, in happy ignorance of the hostile forces converging upon him, Sir Gareth was making a recovery upon which his medical attendant never ceased to congratulate himself. It would be some time before his wound would cease to trouble him (a circumstance due, Lady Hester had no hesitation in asserting, to the shockingly rough and ready methods employed in the extraction of the bullet), and still longer before he could hope to regain his full strength; but the progress he made was steady; and it was not long before he was able to persuade his several nurses to let him leave his bed, and try what the beneficial effects of fresh air would do for him. A small orchard lay behind the inn, and, as the weather continued to be sultry, one golden day succeeded another, it was here that he spent his days, in an idyllic existence which not even the ill-humour of Mrs. Chicklade could mar. That stern moralist had never been convinced of the respectability of the party she was called upon to serve; and when she saw the parlour chairs carried into the orchard, together with a table, and all the cushions the inn could yield, and further discovered that her misguided spouse had consented to carry meals there, she knew that her worst suspicions had fallen short of the truth. A set of heathen gypsies, that’s what Chicklade’s precious ladies and gentlemen of quality were, and let no one dare to tell her different! But Chicklade said that he knew the Quality when he saw it, and while the dibs were in tune the visitors might eat their dinner on the roof, if that was their fancy. As for the morals of the party, it was not for him to criticize an out-and-outer who dropped his blunt as freely as did Sir Gareth.

So Mrs. Chicklade, appeased by the thought of the gold that was flowing into her husband’s coffers, continued to cook three handsome meals a day for her disreputable guests, and startled her neighbours by appearing suddenly in a new and impressive bonnet, and a gown of rich purple hue.

As for the disreputable guests, only Amanda was not entirely content to remain at Little Staughton. Sir Gareth had his own reasons for not wishing to bring his stay to an end; Lady Hester, tending him, sitting in comfortable companionship beside him under the laden fruit trees, valued as she had never been before, was putting on a new bloom; and Hildebrand, inspired by the rural solitude, had made a promising start to his tragic drama, and was not at all anxious to return to a more exacting world. He had got his horse back, too, yielding at last to a command from his adopted uncle to stop being a gudgeon, and to retrieve the noble animal without more ado. He still slept on a camp-bed set up in Sir Gareth’s room: not because his services were any longer needed during the night-watches, but because there were only two guest-chambers in the inn. Sir Gareth was thus kept fully abreast of the drama’s progress, the day’s literary output being read to him each night, and his criticisms and suggestions invited. No qualms were suffered by Hildebrand: he blithely assured Sir Gareth that his parents, believing him to be on a walking-tour of Wales, would not expect to receive any letters from him; and as for the friends he should have joined, they would think only that he had changed his plans, or had been delayed, and would doubtless overtake them.

“Well, wouldn’t you like to?” Sir Gareth asked him. “You know, I am really very well able to manage for myself now, and I don’t want you to feel yourself obliged to remain here on my account. Chicklade can do all I need.”

“Chicklade?” said Hildebrand, revolted. “What, let him tie your cravats with his great clumsy hands? I should rather think not! Just as you have taught me how to tie a Waterfall, too! Besides, Aunt Hester and I have decided that when you are well enough to travel to London I am to go with you, to take care of you on the journey. What’s more, if Amanda should take it into her head to run away again you cannot chase after her, Uncle Gary! And while I am in the vein, I do think that it would be a pity to break the thread of my play. Should you object to it if I just read you the second scene again, now that I have rewritten it?”

So Hildebrand was allowed to remain, although Sir Gareth did not think that Amanda had any intention of running away. Amanda, for once, was at a stand. It had never occurred to her that her grandfather would fail to obey her directions, and how to bring added pressure to bear on him was a problem to which there seemed to be no solution. Time was slipping by, and it might well be that already Neil was under orders to rejoin his brigade. She had not quite reached the stage of capitulation, and still exhaustively scanned the Morning Post,which Mr. Vinehall obligingly sent to the Bull each day; but Sir Gareth was hopeful that by the time he was adjudged to be well enough to travel he would have little difficulty in persuading her to accompany him to London. Nothing would prevail upon her to disclose her grandfather’s identity, but she had begun to toy with a scheme whereby not her grandfather’s hand, but Neil’s, might be forced. Did not Uncle Gary think that if he believed her reputation to be lost, Neil would marry her out of hand?

“It seems most unlikely,” he replied. “Why should he?”

She was sitting on the ground, a half-made cowslip ball in her hands, looking so absurdly youthful as she propounded her outrageous scheme, that he was hard put to it to maintain his gravity. “To save my good name,” she said glibly.

“But he wouldn’t be doing anything of the sort,” he objected. “He would be giving you quite a different name.”

“Yes, but if you lose your reputation, you have to be married in a hurry,” she argued. “I know that, because when Theresa—when someone I know lost hers, which she did, though I am not perfectly sure how, someone else I know said to my aunt that there was nothing for it but to get her married immediately, to save her good name. Well, if you stay all alone with a gentleman you lose your reputation at once,so if I pretended Aunt Hester and Hildebrand weren’t here, wouldn’t Neil feel that it was his duty to marry me, whatever Grandpapa says?”

“No, he would be more likely to feel that I must marry you, and you wouldn’t like that, you know.”

“No, of course I shouldn’t, but you could refuse to marry me, couldn’t you? That would put Neil in a fix!”

“Yes, indeed!” agreed Hester, with unruffled calm. “But I believe that he would think it his duty to challenge Uncle Gary to a duel, and although Uncle is much better, he isn’t strong enough to fight a duel. You wouldn’t wish him to overtax himself.”

“No,” Amanda said reluctantly. “Well, Hildebrand must be the one to do it. Hildebrand! Hildebrand!”

Hildebrand, lying on his stomach at some little distance from them, his fingers writhing amongst his disordered locks as he wrestled with literary composition, vouchsafed only an absent grunt.

“Hildebrand, would you be so obliging as to pretend to compromise me, and then refuse to marry me?” said Amanda cajolingly.

“No, can’t you see I’m busy? Ask Uncle Gary!” said Hildebrand.

This was not encouraging, nor, when he was brought to attend to what was being said to him, did he return any more satisfactory answer. He recommended her not to be silly, and added that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

“I think you are uncivil and disobliging!” said Amanda roundly.

“Oh, no, I’m sure he doesn’t mean to be!” said Hester, looking round for her scissors. “I expect—oh, there they are! however did they come to get over there?—I expect he did not quite understand. Really, Hildebrand, you will only have to refuse to marry Amanda, and surely that is not much to ask?”

“Oh, I don’t mind doing that!”he said, grinning.

“You are an unprincipled woman, Hester,” Sir Gareth told her, at the earliest opportunity.

“Yes, I think I am,” she agreed reflectively. “There can be no doubt of it. Are you really proposing to allow Amanda to regale her Brigade-Major with this abominable story she has concocted?”

But I can see no harm in that,Gareth!” she said, vaguely surprised. “It will make her wish to go to London, besides giving her something to do in planning it all, which she needs,you know, because since the calf at the farm was sent off to the market it is really very dull for her here. And the Brigade-Major cannot possibly be foolish enough to believe the story. Anyone must see that she hasn’t the least notion of what it means to be compromised.”

“And having said that, do you still maintain that she should be permitted to marry the fellow?” he asked.

“It depends on what he is like,” she replied thoughtfully. “I should wish to see him before I made up my mind.”

Her wish was granted on the following afternoon. Sir Gareth, half asleep under a big apple-tree, with Joseph wholly asleep on his knee, became drowsily aware of a menacing presence, and opened his eyes. They fell upon a sandy-haired, stockily-built young gentleman who was standing a few feet away, grimly surveying him. Contempt and wrath flamed in his blue eyes as they took in the splendour of the frogged dressing-gown, which, since his coats fitted him far too well to be eased on over his heavily bandaged shoulder, Sir Gareth was obliged to wear. Interested, and mildly surprised, Sir Gareth sought his quizzing-glass, and through it inspected his unknown visitor.