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"A friend of yours?" asked Hamon loudly.

"I've never met him," said Joan shortly. "I have seen him ... at a distance, and that is all."

There was an awkward silence, but Ralph Hamon was blessed with a thick skin, and although he had been given the lie direct, he was not particularly disconcerted, not even when, attempting to resume the discussion of Morlake's past, Joan brusquely turned the talk into another direction. When Lord Creith had gone to his room, she walked out of the house to the lawn, to watch the lightning flickering in the southern sky, and to think free of Hamon's stifling presence, but he followed her.

"It looks as though it will be a stormy night," he said, by way of making conversation, and she agreed, and was turning back to the house when he stopped her. "Where did you find that woman who's living in the gardener's cottage?" he asked.

She raised her brows in astonishment. It was the last question in the world she expected from him.

"You mean Mrs. Cornford? Why—is she a criminal too?" she asked.