“I am afraid it is only to get to see me. You know he admired me once. Ah, how suspicious I am getting.”
Rosa wrote to Falcon:—
DEAR SIR,—Since my bereavement I see scarcely anybody. My servant did not know you; so I hope you will excuse me. If it is too much trouble to call again, would you kindly explain your note to me?
Yours respectfully,
ROSA STAINES.
Falcon chuckled bitterly over this. “No, my lady,” said he. “I'll serve you out. You shall run after me like a little dog. I have got the bone that will draw you.”
He wrote back coldly to say that the matter he had wished to communicate was too delicate and important to put on paper; that he would try and get down to Gravesend again some day or other, but was much occupied, and had already put himself to inconvenience. He added, in a postscript, that he was always at home from four to five.
Next day he got hold of the servant, and gave her minute instructions, and a guinea.
Then the wretch got some tools and bored a hole in the partition wall of his sitting-room. The paper had large flowers. He was artist enough to conceal the trick with water-colors. In his bed-room the hole came behind the curtains.
That very afternoon, as he had foreseen, Mrs. Staines called on him. The maid, duly instructed, said Mr. Falcon was out, but would soon return, and could she wait his return? The maid being so very civil, Mrs. Staines said she would wait a little while, and was immediately ushered into Falcon's sitting-room. There she sat down; but was evidently ill at ease, restless, flushed. She could not sit quiet, and at last began to walk up and down the room, almost wildly. Her beautiful eyes glittered, and the whole woman seemed on fire. The caitiff, who was watching her, saw and gloated on all this, and enjoyed to the full her beauty and agitation, and his revenge for her “Not at homes.”