quite clear--isn't it?--that Harry wanted him to take up the work. You
can read that in the words. I can imagine him speaking them and hear the
tone he would use. Besides--I have still a greater fear than the one of
which you know. I don't want Dick, when he grows up, ever to think that I
have been cowardly, and, because I was cowardly, disloyal to his father."

"Yes, I see," said Colonel Dewes.

And this time he really did understand.

"We will go in and lunch," said Sybil, and they walked back to the house.




CHAPTER VI

A LONG WALK


The footsteps sounded overhead with a singular regularity. From the
fireplace to the door, and back again from the door to the fireplace. At
each turn there was a short pause, and each pause was of the same
duration. The footsteps were very light; it was almost as though an
animal, a caged animal, padded from the bars at one end to the bars at
the other. There was something stealthy in the footsteps too.

In the room below a man of forty-five sat writing at a desk--a very tall,
broad-shouldered man, in clerical dress. Twenty-five years before he had
rowed as number seven in the Oxford Eight, with an eye all the while upon