"Oh, how should she?" Gimblet returned evasively. "I don't suppose my presence would appear worth commenting upon to anyone but yourself or Lord Ashiel, unless Lady Ruth should mention it."
"I don't think she will," said Juliet. "She said she could not speak to anyone to-day, and she and Mark have gone off together in his own boat. I said I would walk home."
"Won't you drive with me?" Gimblet suggested.
He had hired a "machine" from the distant village of Inverlegan to carry him to and from the funeral. But Juliet preferred to walk, finding in physical exercise the only relief she could obtain from the aching trouble that oppressed and sickened her.
Gimblet drove back alone to the cottage. He had much to occupy his thoughts.
Once back in his room he turned his mind to the writing on the sheet of paper.
"Remember that where there's a way there's a will. Face curiosity and take the bull by the horn."
The message, as Gimblet read it, was as puzzling as if it had been completely in cipher.
If certain of the words possessed some arbitrary meaning to which the key promised by Lord Ashiel would have furnished the solution, there seemed little hope of understanding the message until the key was found. The word "way," for instance, might stand for another that had been previously decided on, and if rightly construed probably indicated the place where the papers were concealed. "Will," "face," "curiosity," "bull" and "horn" were likely to represent other very different words, or perhaps even whole sentences.
Without the key it was hopeless to search along that line; such search must end, as it would begin, in conjecture only. He would see if anything more promising could be arrived at by taking the message as it was and assuming that all the words bore the meaning usually attributed to them. For more than an hour Gimblet racked his brains to read sense into the senseless phrases, and at the end of that time was no wiser than at the beginning.
"Where there's a way there's a will." Was it by accident or design that the order in which the words way and will were placed was different from the one commonly assigned to them? Had Lord Ashiel made a mistake in arranging the message? Or did the "will" refer to his will and testament? If so, why should he take so roundabout a way of designating it? Doubtless because something more important than the will was involved; indeed, if anything was clear, from the ambiguous sentence and the precaution that Ashiel had taken that though it fell into the hands of his enemies it should convey nothing to them, it was that he considered the mystification of the uninitiated a matter of transcendental importance. It was plain he contemplated the possibility of the Nihilists knowing where to look for his message; and at the thought Gimblet shifted uneasily in his chair, remembering his first encounter with their representative.