‘Not in the least. She gives me only the vaguest hints. I half fancy it is only an affectionate ruse to get me back to England for a time.’
But it was something more than that, as the reader will now see.
Some eleven months had elapsed since the last advertisement had been published, offering a large reward for information concerning the marriage of Herbert Farrington and Annie Orde, but no satisfactory answer had been received. Hope was already failing all but the sanguine old Lady Farrington, who kept on declaring persistently that the right would certainly prosper in the end. As she was the only person who stoutly maintained that proofs of the marriage must certainly be forthcoming, so she was the only one who was not surprised, when one morning a mysterious letter arrived from no one knew where, and sent by no one knew whom.
It was addressed to Mr. Bellhouse, who had long been the family’s solicitor, as well as Lady Farrington’s, and consisted of only a few lines scribbled, on the back of an old invoice for goods:—
‘Those who seek find. Search the registers of the parish of Stickford-le-Clay, in the county of ——. He who was once Herbert Farrington sends this.’
A communication which drove Lady Farrington nearly frantic. It revived, and indeed supported, all her old fancies, that her injured son was still alive. She declared that she recognised his handwriting; she began once more, although a long interval had elapsed, to hear his voice and to see his beloved form in her dreams. She talked incessantly about him and his probable return. Had she not been carefully tended and watched by her own servants, she might have had a very serious relapse.
[CHAPTER X.]
A LAWYER’S LETTER.
Farrington Hall was an excellent specimen of our sixteenth century domestic architecture. It was a long low red-bricked building, with white stone mullions, and it stood on a gentle eminence, which dominated the far-reaching, low-lying fat lands of the Farrington estate. It had all the conventional surroundings which confer dignity on an old place; magnificent trees, in which lived a prosperous colony of rooks; a great park of velvety grass; a broad, slow stream at the foot of the slope on which stood the Hall.