When she came back presently a little out of breath, Mrs. Glynde, with a very grave face, was retracing her steps in the direction of the park gates.
“I see it is useless for me to stay any longer,” she said; “will you like to keep these verses of Arthur’s?—I don’t suppose he will ever send you any more.”
“Ah, yes, I may as well keep them. Tell him if I don’t see him again I will write, ‘In memoriam of A. G.’ across the top of the page; but—”
“Juliet, I shall take no messages to my poor boy that will drive him to despair. If you have anything to say that will give him hope I’ll carry that.”
“You wouldn’t let me finish what I was going to say—I declare there is that lovely butterfly again!”
And once more she would have started in pursuit if Mrs. Glynde had not absolutely taken both of her hands in hers and kept her rooted to the spot.
“I insist on knowing what you were going to say,” she exclaimed. “I will not stand here to be tortured as you torture Arthur.”
“Dear me,” said Juliet, in mild astonishment; “first you won’t let me speak, and then you hold both my hands, and ‘insist’ on my saying what I was going to say when you prevented me.”
“You said if you didn’t see him again you would write ‘In memoriam of A. G.’ across the top of his verses; but—” said Mrs. Glynde, anxious to bring her back to the point.
“But it will give me very great pleasure if he’ll come and see me here on the twenty-first of next month. That was all I had to say when you interrupted me.”
“All!” cried the delighted Mrs. Glynde. “It is quite enough! I understand! Goodbye to the expedition that starts on the twentieth, if you want to see him on the twenty-first.”
She tiptoed, and insisted on kissing Juliet on both cheeks—an embrace which Juliet received very coolly. Then she quickened her footsteps. “I must get back as soon as possible,” she said, “I told the MacNamaras I wouldn’t keep their carriage for more than an hour, and I’ve kept it for nearly three.”
It was easy to see that her haste to get back was stimulated by her fear lest the wayward girl might, in another minute, so qualify her message as to render it not worth delivering.
In order the more effectually to prevent such a catastrophe, she hastily turned the talk on other topics—a recent wedding, the newest mode in hairdressing, the latest piece of gossip that had reached her ears.
“The way people talk is beyond everything—no one is let alone in these days,” she said; “do you know, Juliet, actually last night when I was dining at the Adeanes, I was asked—you’ll scarcely believe it—if there was any truth in the report that Ida and her husband had quarrelled on their way to the station, and that Captain Culvers had gone off to Paris alone, and that Ida had returned home, and was staying with you at Dering?”
She said this with her eyes fixed on Juliet’s face.
And if she had spoken out all the truth, she would have said not only that she had been asked the question at her dinner-party of the previous night, but that her own maid that very morning, as she had assisted in her toilet, had told her of Captain Culvers’s sudden return to Glynde Lodge without his bride, and of Lady Culvers’s strange story to account for the fact.
Juliet’s calm, pale face gave no sign.
“It’s perfectly true, every word of it,” she answered, coolly; “Ida is at the present moment at the Hall—in a padded room on the top storey, contrived expressly for our family lunatics of a previous generation. And Sefton has been sent to prison for marrying her, whence in due course he’ll emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, shake his beautiful wings, and float straight away to heaven. Goodbye, Mrs. Glynde, give my love to Lily MacNamara. Tell her next time she wears that apple-green dress of hers not to put so much Condy’s flaid to her hair. The contrast of tints is quite too appalling!”
X
The next day was to bring news of a startling kind to the Hall. Juliet was spending a lazy morning feeding the waterfowl on the lake, and making believe to read Red Cotton Nightcap Country, when a message was brought to her that Lord Culvers wished to see her in his study at once. She went back to find her father waiting at the hall-door for her with an open letter in his hand, and a look on his face which said “something to tell” plainly as words could.
“News of Ida’s brooch,” he said, so soon as her feet were inside the door. Then he led the way into his study, spread the letter before her, and bade her read it.
It came under cover from Messrs. Hunt and Locke, of Chancery Lane. The writer was an English priest—Baldwin by name—who officiated at the church of the Carmelite Friars, in the Rue Bellarmine, Paris, He stated that on the previous Sunday at the midday celebration of mass a diamond brooch, answering in all respects to the one described in the advertisement in the daily papers, had been dropped into the offertory bag. By whom—whether by a penitent as an offering, or by a thief in order to escape detection—he could not say. The church was crowded at the time, and the brother who had collected the alms had not noticed anything unusual in the manner of giving in any part of the church.
The writer concluded by giving his address in the Rue Bellarmine, and stating that the brooch was in his possession awaiting identification from its owner.
Juliet’s face grew as white as her father’s
