“Yes,” said Letty, and then—she added, in short, gasping sentences: “I ran away to him yesterday to London—but I changed my mind. I could not desert Cara.—I came back. Hugo had returned suddenly, and read my letter, and took me by the shoulders, thrust me out, and slammed the door on me. I feel sure he will try and divorce me!”
Frances’ clear mind grasped a subject quickly. What a disastrous affair for Lancelot! What was to be done? Obviously the first step was to take Letty into the house—she looked ghastly.
“Brother or no brother,” she said—stifling her own dismay—“you must come and stay with us, and pull yourself together. Matters may not be as bad as you think.”
“They are—and it’s all my fault. I have ruined your brother, and disgraced myself, and Cara!”
This speech brought her into the Rectory door, which stood wide, and she tottered into a chair in the hall, and fainted away.
As soon as the refugee had been restored and put to bed in the spare room, Frances, a woman of action, wrote off to Mrs. Hesketh and to her brother, and despatched a note to Bates at the Court with a request for Mrs. Blagdon’s luggage. Then she proceeded to explain matters to her invalid father, who was enchanted to hear that Mrs. Blagdon was staying with them—though he could not quite understand how it was, that she should be in his house and not her own; but his resourceful daughter satisfied his curiosity, and told a lie, with the one simple word ‘Drains!’
Exhausted by bodily fatigue and mental emotion, Letty slept soundly till the church clock, striking nine, roused her from a sleep, that had bordered upon stupor. Where was she? asked recovering consciousness. The scene was strange, and beautiful—a wide-open window, the perfume of flowers, above, in the summer sky, a slim young moon. Was she dead, and was this house Heaven? Suddenly, with a torrential rush, black memory overwhelmed her.
During the next twenty-four hours, Frances Lumley was all that a sister, and more than some sisters would be, to the unhappy refugee. She consoled, soothed, cheered her,—keeping her own tremors respecting Lancelot entirely out of sight. Then Mrs. Hesketh appeared upon the scene, and carried her friend away to Oldcourt. Francie Lumley was a dear girl, with a heart of gold, but it was not seemly that Mrs. Blagdon should be her guest, with the case of Blagdon v. Blagdon and Lumley, imminent in the Law Courts.
It soon became noised abroad that Blagdon was about to divorce his wife, and mothers with daughters, once more began to cast expectant eyes on Sharsley.