“That makes it easier,” he replied, with a faint sneer. “Now I am going for the doctor.” And he went out. “She is in it too,” he soliloquised as he sped along through the cool night. “It is a horrible business—horrible—horrible! But the mother? Well, she answered the question. Still, when she comes round, I shall insist upon her answering it again in words, or in writing.”
But his question was destined to remain unanswered, for Mrs Daventer never did come round. A couple of hours after Philip’s return with the medical man she died. But she never spoke again.
The doctors pronounced it a plain case of heart disease, though they wrapped their definition up in a layer of technical jargon that was anything but plain. So the only person who could have cleared up the doubt was silent for ever, and the true secret of Laura’s paternity lay buried in her mother’s grave.
Chapter Thirty Three.
“For a Brother’s Blood.”
The wind soughed mournfully through the great beech-forests which cover the slopes leading up to the Roncevallés plateau.
It was early morning—gloomy and lowering. The two occupants of the open carriage wending its way at a footpace up the steep mountain road were well wrapped up, for at that elevation, late summer as it was, the air was biting and chill.
“And so you are determined to go through with this, Orlebar?” one of them was saying. “Can it not be arranged even now?”