At the point where the other path led to
the house, he glanced over his shoulder at the young barrister.
"If you keep straight on, Mr. Collingwood," he said, "you'll get
straight down to the village and the inn. I must go this way."
He went off rapidly, and Collingwood walked on through the plantation
towards the _Normandale Arms_--wondering, all the way, why Pratt was so
anxious to know exactly when it was that Mrs. Mallathorpe had been
warned about the old bridge.
CHAPTER XI
THE PREVALENT ATMOSPHERE
Until that afternoon Collingwood had never been in the village to which
he was now bending his steps; on that and his previous visits to the
Grange he had only passed the end of its one street. Now, descending
into it from the slopes of the park, he found it to be little more than
a hamlet--a church, a farmstead or two, a few cottages in their gardens,
all clustering about a narrow stream spanned by a high-arched bridge of
stone. The _Normandale Arms_, a roomy, old-fashioned place, stood at one
end of the bridge, and from the windows of the room into which
Collingwood was presently shown he could look out on the stream itself
and on the meadows beyond it. A peaceful, pretty, quiet place--but the
gloom which was heavy at the big house or the hill seemed to have spread
to everybody that he encountered.
"Bad job, this, sir!" said the landlord, an elderly, serious-faced man,
to whom Collingwood had made known his wants, and who had quickly formed
the opinion that his guest was of the legal profession.
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