They reached the willows and poplars at last; and Wolf stared in astonishment at what he saw. He found himself standing on the brink of an expanse of water that was nearly as large as a small lake. The opposite side of it was entirely covered with a bed of thick reeds, among which he could see the little red-and-black shapes of several moorhens moving; but from where he stood, under these willows, right away to the pond’s centre, the water was deep and dark, and even on that placid Sunday a little menacing.

“He could have done it easily if he’d wanted to, couldn’t he?” said Jason, gazing at the water. “The truth is he didn’t want to! Darnley’s a sentimental fool. Redfern didn’t want to drown himself. Not a bit of it. What did he come here for, then? He came to rouse pity, to make people’s minds go crazy with pity.”

“The man must have been thinking of saying just this to me all the way across the field,” thought Wolf. But Jason jerked out now a much more disturbing sentence.