Henry went away by an early train, and Jane came down to what, as a child, she had once described as a crumpled kind of day. She remembered “darling Jimmy” looking at her in a vague way, and saying in his gentle, cultivated voice:  
“Crumpled, my dear Jane? What do you mean by crumpled?”
 
And Jane, frowning and direct:
 
“I mean a thing that’s got crumps in it, Jimmy darling,” and when Mr. Carruthers did not appear to find this a sufficient explanation, she had burst into emphatic elucidation:
 
“I was cross, and Nurse was cross, and you were cross. Yes, you were, and I had only just opened the study door ever so little; and I didn’t mean to upset the milk or to break the soap-dish; and oh, Jimmy, you must know what a crump is, and this day has been just chock-full of them. That’s why I said it was crumpled.”
 
The day of Henry’s departure was undoubtedly a crumpled day. To start with, a letter from Mr. Molloy awaited Jane at the breakfast table. It began, “My dear Renata,” and was signed, “Your affectionate father, Cornelius R. Molloy.” Mr. Ember remarked at once upon the unusual circumstance of there being a letter for Miss Molloy, and Jane, acting on an impulse which she afterwards regretted, replied:
 
 
“It’s from my father. Do you want to see what he says?”
 
“Thank you,” said Jeffrey Ember. He glanced casually at the bald sentences in which Mr. Molloy hoped that his daughter was well, and expressed dislike of the climatic conditions which he had encountered on the voyage. His eyes rested for a moment upon the signature, and quite suddenly he cast a bombshell at Jane.
 
“What does the ‘R’ stand for?” he said.
 
Jane had the worst moment of panic with which her adventure had yet provided her. She was about to say that she did not know, and take the consequences, when Mr. Ember saved her.
 
“Is it Renatus?” he asked. Jane broke into voluble speech.
 
“Oh no,” she said, “my name has nothing to do with his. I was called Renata after an aunt, my mother’s twin sister. They were exactly alike and devoted to each other, and I was called after my Aunt Renata, and her only daughter was called after my mother.” Here Jane bit the tip of her tongue and stopped, but she had not stopped in time. Mr. Ember’s eyes had left Molloy’s signature and were fixed upon her face.
 
“And your mother’s name?” he said.
 
“Jane,” faltered Jane.
 
“And are you and your cousin as much alike as your mothers were?”
 
Jane stared at her plate. She stared so hard that the gilt rim seemed to detach itself and float like a nimbus above a half-finished slice of buttered toast.
 
 
“I—I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t remember my mother, and I never saw my aunt.” Once again she bit her tongue, and this time very hard indeed. She had been within an ace of saying, “My Aunt Jane——”
 
“But you have seen your cousin; by the way, what is her surname?”
 
“Smith—Jane Smith.”
 
“You have seen your cousin, Jane Smith? Are you alike?”
 
“I have only seen her once.” Jane grasped her courage, and looked straight at Mr. Ember. He either knew something, or this was just idle teasing. In either case being afraid would not serve her. A spice of humour might.
 
“You’re frightfully interested in my aunts and cousins,” she said. “Do you want to find another secretary just like me for some one? But I’m afraid my Cousin Jane isn’t available. She’s married to a man in Bolivia.”
 
At this point Lady Heritage looked over the edge of The Times with a frown, and the conversation dropped. Jane finished her buttered toast, and admired herself because her hand did not shake.
 
 
Lady Heritage seemed to be in a frowning mood. This, it appeared, was not one of the days when she disappeared behind the steel grating with Ember, leaving Jane to pursue her appointed tasks in the library. Instead, there was a general sorting of correspondence and checking of work already done, with the result that Jane found herself being played upon, as it were, by a jet or spray of hot water. The temperature varied, but the spray was continuous. A letter to which Lady Heritage particularly wished to refer was not to be found, a package of papers wrongly addressed had come back through the Dead Letter Office, and an unanswered invitation was discovered in the “Answered” file. By three o’clock that afternoon Jane had been made to feel that it was possible that the world might contain a person duller, more inept, and less competent than herself—possible, but not probable.
 
“I think you had better go for a walk, Miss Molloy,” said Lady Heritage; “perhaps some fresh air....” She did not finish the sentence, and Jane, only too thankful to escape, made haste from the presence.
 
Ember had been right when he said that the grounds were extensive.
 
Jane skirted the house and made her way through a space of rather formally kept garden to where a gravel path followed the edge of the cliff. For a time it was bordered by veronica and fuchsia bushes, but after a while these ceased and left the bare down with its rather coarse grass, tiny growing plants, tangled brambles, and bright yellow clumps of gorse. The path went up and down. Sometimes it almost overhung the sea. Always a tall hedge of barbed wire straggled across the view and spoilt it.
 
The fact that a powerful electric current ran through the wire and made it dangerous to touch added to the dislike with which she regarded it.
 
111
It was a grey afternoon with a whipping wind from the north-west that beat up little crests of foam on the lead-coloured waves and made Jane clutch at her hat every now and then. She thought it cold when she started, but by and by she began to enjoy the sense of motion, the wind’s buffets, and the wide, clear outlook. At the farthest point of the headland she stopped, warm and glowing. The path ran out to the edge of the cliff. On the landward side the rock rose sharply, naked of grass, and heaped with rough boulders. A small cave or hollow ran inwards for perhaps four feet. In front of it, in fact almost within it, stood a stone bench pleasantly sheltered by the overhanging rock and curving sides of the hollow. Jane felt no need of shelter. Instead of sitting down, she climbed upon the back of the bench and, steadying herself against a rock, looked out over the wire and saw how the cliff fell away, sheer at first, and then in a series of jagged, tumbled steps until the rocks went down into the sea.
 
After a time Jane scrambled down and was hesitating as to whether she would turn or not when a sound attracted her attention.
 
The path ended by the stone bench, but there seemed to be quite a practicable grassy track beyond.
 
The sound which Jane had heard was the sound made by a stone which has become displaced on a hillside. It must have been a very heavy stone. It fell with a muffled crash. Then came another sound which she could not place. She looked all round and could see nothing.
 
Something frightened her.
 
All at once she realised that she was a long way from the house and quite out of sight. Turning quickly, she began to walk back along the way that she had come, but she had not gone a dozen paces before she heard scrambling footsteps behind her. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the man George Patterson standing beside the stone seat which she had just left. He made some sort of beckoning sign with his hand and called out, but a puff of wind took away the words, and only a hoarse, and as she thought, threatening sound reached her ears.
 
 
Without waiting to hear or see any more she began to run, and with the first flying step that she took there came upon her a blind, driving ............