Mannering answered her without a touch of levity. He, too, was unusually
serious.

"We have the better part," he said. "Yet Borrowdean is one of those men
who know very well how to play upon the heartstrings. A human being is
like a musical instrument to him. He knows how to find out the harmonies
or strike the discords."

She turned away.

"I am superstitious," she murmured, with a little shiver. "I suppose that
it is this ghostly mist, and the silence which has come with it. Yet I
wish that your friend had stayed away from Blakely!"

* * * * *

Upstairs from her window Clara also was gazing along the road where
Borrowdean had disappeared. And Borrowdean himself was puzzling over a
third telegram which Mannering had carelessly passed on to him with his
own, and which, although it was clearly addressed to Mannering, he had,
after a few minutes' hesitation, opened. It had been handed in at the
Strand Post-office.

"I must see you this week.--Blanche."

A few hours later, on his arrival in London, Borrowdean repeated this
message to Mannering from the same post-office, and quietly tearing up
the original went down to the House.