"Mistletoe, eh?" remarked the stranger. The
Sergeant spat on the road; they resumed their way, pursuing the road
across the heath.
It was fine, but overclouded and decidedly dark. Every now and then
Bennett, to call the stranger by what was almost confessedly a
_nom-de-guerre,_ flashed a powerful electric torch on the roadway.
"Don't want to walk into a gorse-bush," he explained with a laugh.
"Put it away, you darned fool! We're nearly there."
The stranger obeyed. In another seven or eight minutes there loomed up,
on the left hand, the dim outline of Mr. Saffron's abode--the square
cottage with the odd round tower annexed.
"There you are!" The Sergeant's voice instinctively kept to a whisper.
"That's what you want to see."
"But I can't see it--not so as to get any clear idea."
No lights showed from the cottage, nor, of course, from the Tower; its
only window had been, as Mr. Penrose said, boarded up. The wind--there
was generally a wind on the heath--stirred the fir-trees and the bushes
into a soft movement and a faint murmur of sound. A very acute and alert
ear might perhaps have caught another sound--footfalls on the road, a
good long way behind them.
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