After a while she began to recover sufficiently to be able to think, to realize her position, and to look vaguely and indifferently towards the future.
The doctor, and the secretary of the great man, had gone into Francis Lisle's affairs, and discovered that a portion of his small income had died with him, and that what remained amounted to only a few pounds a year—not enough, by itself, to keep body and soul together. There was a little money in hand, but the largest part of that sum consisted of the fifty pounds paid by Mr. Temple for the picture he had bought; and Leslie, directly she was able to think, resolved that she would return the money, though it, and it alone, should stand between her and starvation.
There was something else also that she must return—the diamond pendant which Yorke had given her.
That, too, must go back. She could not summon up sufficient courage to take it from its hiding-place as yet; and, indeed, she did not know where to send it, unless she addressed it to the Dorchester Club, and it seemed to her that it would be wrong to send so valuable an article to a club; that she ought to send it to the duke's residence.
A woman of the world would have been aware that the address of so well-known a personage as the Duke of Rothbury could be found in a London directory; but Leslie was anything but a woman of the world, and felt helpless in her ignorance.
There was another article which lay in her box beside the diamond pendant; Ralph Duncombe's ring.
She remembered that, in a weary, listless way. He had said, when he placed it in her hand, that if ever she needed a friend, a helper, an avenger, she had but to send that ring to him and he would come to her side. But, though she were in the sorest strait in which a woman could be placed, she would not summon Ralph Duncombe to her aid; for to do so would be tantamount to engaging herself to him. The mere thought made her wince and shudder; it was an insult to the love that lay dormant in her bosom—her love for Yorke.
One day she got out her money, and spread it on the table and counted it. With the strictest economy it would not go very far, and it was all that stood between her and the grim wolf, destitution; for she felt that she would rather die than appeal for assistance to her father's relatives.
"In the struggle for life we forget our dead," says the philosopher; and the problem of what was to become of her gradually drew her away from the sad brooding over her bereavement.