This was the first intimation to Lucy Warrender's friends in London of her sudden death.
"Poor thing!" said Mrs. Charmington, now quite the old woman, "I wonder how she managed that lovely-coloured hair."
CHAPTER III.
AN ANONYMOUS LETTER.
Mrs. Haggard and her husband, both in deep mourning, sat in the special boudoir at Walls End Castle which had been furnished and set apart for his grand-nephew's wife on her first arrival years ago by old Lord Pit Town. Haggard looked pale and weary, and well he might, for he had gone straight to Monte Carlo and had come straight back, stopping only forty-eight hours there, just time enough to lay Lucy Warrender in her grave. He had not gone alone; at his wife's insistance he had taken the young Lucius with him. He had been astonished at the determined manner in which Georgie pressed this arrangement upon him; he yielded, though with a bad grace. When he reached the Hotel de Russie, both he and Lucius had declined to look on the face of the dead woman. Haggard had a long interview with Fanchette, and then he called upon the Commissary of Police. The night before his mother was laid in her grave, Lucius Haggard, unknown to his companion, who was shut up in his room writing, visited the Rooms, won a couple of thousand francs, and thoroughly enjoyed himself.
The next day the two men stood by the side of the shallow grave; graves are shallow in Monaco, for the ground is very rocky. A wandering English clergyman, of more than doubtful reputation, gabbled through the service for the burial of the dead. The stones and bits of rock rattled upon the coffin with a hollow sound, for the grave-digger didn't trouble himself much about the feelings of the relatives of the foreign heretic.
"I think my aunt Lucy went off tremendously in the last year," said young Lucius to his companion as they left the cemetery.