The Traitor's Gate by Edgar Wallace — Read

WHEN STIMMINGS, the butler, bolted and chained the great door of Monk's Chase for the night, he reported to his uninterested master that it was "pouring heavens hard." It had been raining all the afternoon, and by dinner-time the downpour was steady and voluminous. The rain pond began to form in the hollow beneath Lower Oaks; only the middle of the gravelled drive showed above the flanking torrents that ran down from Black Wood and the hill behind and formed a miniature lake about the lodge gates until the rim of it spread to the ditch. A night as black as pitch and filled with the hissing of water; a night when cottagers sat beneath leaking roofs and planned new thatchings or cursed the parsimony of landlords, The station fly from Worplethorpe came slowly through the downpour; the steady clop-clop if its ancient horse a melancholy accompaniment to groan and grind of steel-tyred wheels. A tap on the window and the driver pulled at his wet reins, the door of the old landau screeched open and a slight figure stepped down into the road. It was a girl, wrapped from chin to heel in a shining black oilskin. Her hat was pulled down almost over her eyes so that little of her face could be seen in the dim yellow of the lamp. "Thank you, this will do," she said. "I may be an hour or less. Perhaps you can find some sort of shelter until I return."

The driver stooped over to speak and a rivulet of water poured from the curly brim of his hat. "Didn't you want to go to the Chase, Miss? I can take you up the drive to the house; you'll get wet through."