"Uncommonly!"
"Go to bed, you goose," said Spencer Coyle, with another laugh. "But
before you go tell me what he said when she told him he was trying to
deceive you."
"'Take me there yourself, then, and lock me in!'"
"And _did_ she take him?"
"I don't know--I came up."
Spencer Coyle exchanged a long look with his pupil.
"I don't think they're in the hall now. Where's Owen's own room?"
"I haven't the least idea."
Mr. Coyle was perplexed; he was in equal ignorance, and he couldn't go
about trying doors. He bade young Lechmere sink to slumber, and came out
into the passage. He asked himself if he should be able to find his way
to the room Owen had formerly shown him, remembering that in common with
many of the others it had its ancient name painted upon it. But the
corridors of Paramore were intricate; moreover some of the servants
would still be up, and he didn't wish to have the appearance of roaming
over the house. He went back to his own quarters, where Mrs. Coyle soon
perceived that his inability to rest had not subsided. As she confessed
for her own part, in the dreadful place, to an increased sense of
"creepiness," they spent the early part of the night in conversation, so
that a portion of their vigil was inevitably beguiled by her husband's
account of his colloquy with little Lechmere and by their exchange of
opinions upon it. Toward two o'clock Mrs. Coyle became so nervous about
their persecuted young friend, and so possessed by the fear that that
wicked girl had availed herself of his invitation to put him to an
abominable test, that she begged her husband to go and look into the
matter at whatever cost to his own equilibrium. But Spencer Coyle,
perversely, had ended, as the perfect stillness of the night settled
upon them, by charming himself into a tremulous acquiescence in Owen's
readiness to face a formidable ordeal--an ordeal the more formidable to
an excited imagination as the poor boy now knew from the experience of
the previous night how resolute an effort he should have to make. "I
hope he _is_ there," he said to his wife: "it puts them all so in the
wrong!" At any rate he couldn't take upon himself to explore a house he
knew so little. He was inconsequent--he didn't prepare for bed. He sat
in the dressing-room with his light and his novel, waiting to find
himself nodding. At last however Mrs. Coyle turned over and ceased to
talk, and at last too he fell asleep in his chair. How long he slept he
only knew afterwards by computation; what he knew to begin with was that
he had started up, in confusion, with the sense of a sudden appalling
sound. His sense cleared itself quickly, helped doubtless by a
confirmatory cry of horror from his wife's room. But he gave no heed to
his wife; he had already bounded into the passage. There the sound was
repeated--it was the "Help! help!" of a woman in agonised terror. It
came from a distant quarter of the house, but the quarter was
sufficiently indicated. Spencer Coyle rushed straight before him, with
the sound of opening doors and alarmed voices in his ears and the
faintness of the early dawn in his eyes. At a turn of one of the
passages he came upon the white figure of a girl in a swoon on a bench,
and in the vividness of the revelation he read as he went that Kate
Julian, stricken in her pride too late with a chill of compunction for
what she had mockingly done, had, after coming to release the victim of
her derision, reeled away, overwhelmed, from the catastrophe that was
her work--the catastrophe that the next moment he found himself aghast
at on the threshold of an open door. Owen Wingrave, dressed as he had
last seen him, lay dead on the spot on which his ancestor had been
found. He looked like a young soldier on a battle-field.