"I hope he will not wish to renew the sittings; but no doubt he has found some fresh whim by this time. I wish he had let Phyllis alone; he did her no good."
"Poor little soul, I am afraid she finds it dismal," said Lucy.
"I mean to plan a little dissipation for us both when you are away—the theatre, probably," said Gertrude, who felt remorsefully that in her anxiety concerning Lucy she had rather neglected Phyllis.
"Yes, do, and take care of yourself, dear old Gerty," said Lucy, as the cab drew up at Paddington station.
The sisters embraced long and silently, and in a few minutes Lucy was steaming westward in a third-class carriage, and Gertrude was making her way through the fog to Praed Street station. At Baker Street she perceived that Mrs. Maryon's prophecy was undergoing fulfilment; the fog had lifted a little, and flakes of snow were falling at slow intervals.
Before the door of Number 20B a small brougham was standing—a brougham, as she observed by the light of the street lamp, with a coronet emblazoned on the panels.
"Lord Watergate is in the studio, miss," announced Mrs. Maryon, who opened the door; "he only came a minute ago, and preferred to wait. I have lit the lamp." As Gertrude was going towards the studio the woman ran up to her, and put a note in her hand. "I forgot to give you this," she said. "I found it in the letter-box a minute after you left."
Gertrude, glancing hastily at the envelope, recognised, with some surprise, the childish handwriting of her sister Phyllis, and concluded that she had decided to remain overnight at the Devonshires.
"She might have remembered that I was alone," she thought, a little wistfully as she opened the door of the waiting-room.