“And—and——”
Here he stopped short. Old Hannah’s responses were so short and unsympathetic that they checked his fluency.
“Is there anything more you want, sir?” inquired old Hannah, with exasperating tranquillity; “because, if not, me and my husband would be glad to go to bed. We aren’t accustomed to late hours, like fashionable folks.”
Colonel Dacre slipped a couple of half-crown pieces into her hand.
“Put those under your pillow, to make you sleep,” he said.
Old Hannah turned them over two or three times, and then handed them back, resolutely and reluctantly.
“I don’t care for money I haven’t earned,” she said. “When people seek to bribe you, you’re an idiot if you don’t guess what they mean. You want to know where my mistress is gone, and you fancy I can tell you; but I can’t, and, if I could, I wouldn’t. I don’t need instructing just when to hold my tongue.”
Colonel Dacre looked baffled and annoyed, although he felt that the woman was right.
“It’s a pity you make so much mystery about Lady Gwendolyn’s movements,” he said. “Secrecy always excites suspicion.”
“I have never knew the person yet who ever dared to suspect my mistress,” she answered proudly. “Anyhow, nobody can tell what they don’t know. Her ladyship left about five o’clock this evening, and it warn’t my place to ask where she was going. If it had been necessary for me to know, she would have told me, of course.”