“What! in the hotel? But I thought you wrote me that you had left.”
“I did leave for a few hours—just long enough to get my hair dyed golden, and to put myself in deep mourning, when I returned as ‘Miss Mordaunt.’”
“I wonder you weren’t recognized by the servants.”
“None of them had seen me at all plainly. I was very anxious they should not, after my encounter with Mrs. O’Hara, as I did not know what she might say, and so I took my precautions. Besides, the golden hair does alter one a good deal.”
“I knew you at once, Gwen.”
“You looked into my eyes first.”
“Wherever my first glance had fallen it would have been the same thing, Gwen. Indeed, if I had put out my hand in the darkness and touched you, some subtle sense would have told me who it was.”
“‘By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.’”
quoted Lady Gwendolyn gaily. “I suppose that is the kind of warning you would have found at your fingers’ ends, Lawrence.”