“I sha’n’t be gone more than three or four days,” added the colonel, seeing the other looked surprised. “You may confidently expect me by Saturday at the latest.”
It was to be hoped Graham did not take his master quite at his word, for a great many Saturdays would come and go before Colonel Dacre would cross his own threshold again.
Indeed, he little suspected what this journey was to bring forth, or he would have counter-ordered his dog-cart assuredly, tossed Lady Teignmouth’s card into the waste-basket, and made up his mind to await calmly the issue of events, and abide by the result.
However, four o’clock saw the “gallant colonel”—as the local newspaper always designated him—stepping into a first-class carriage at Borton Station, bound for “fair London town,” en route for Turoy Grange, near Westhampton, Yorkshire.
He remembered as he went along that he had often heard Lady Gwendolyn speak, half jestingly, of her “mansion” at Turoy, and declare it to be such a “ghostly place that only a person with a very clear conscience could venture to stay there even for a night.”
She and Lord Teignmouth had often spent their holidays there when children; but then their mother was alive, and the place had been made bright for their occupation.
The last four years it had been seldom inhabited, although it was one of Lady Gwendolyn’s caprices to have it kept in perfect order and repair, that it might be available, supposing she cared to run down there at any time.
An old nurse of hers, with her husband, lived in the house—that Colonel Dacre also remembered to have heard; and had been pleased at Lady Gwendolyn’s thoughtful provision for one who had been good to her when she was a child. But from the description given him of Turoy it was the last place for a spoiled beauty to take refuge in, unless she had some reason at the moment to feel disgusted with the world and her friends, and needed a spell of solitude to get her into a better mood.
“If I could believe that she had run away to Turoy on my account I should be the happiest man alive,” Colonel Dacre said to himself, with a wild thrill, for it seemed to him that this would be sure proof that he was not indifferent to her. “Otherwise, what could there be in my secret to pain and annoy her?”
And then he set himself to work out the problem how she could have found anything in his mother’s boudoir to enlighten her on this point. He had not solved it to his satisfaction when the train whistled its way into London, and he was obliged to attend to the more practical details of his journey. He found, on consulting the time-table, that there was no train which stopped at Westhampton until the morning express, and, therefore, he decided to go to a hotel, and get a few hours’ rest.