Mrs Stroud sat and looked at her recovered nephew, at his good clothes, his watch chain, his air of undoubted respectability, and also at the unembarrassed and cheerful air with which he faced her.
“What are you going to do now?” she said.
“That must depend on Mr Alwyn. He thought Mr Edgar would perhaps have helped him search, or told him how the land lay, anyhow; so he wrote him a note appointing a meeting, which I gave to little Wyn Warren in the wood. It seems he lost it; and, though the meeting came about, Mr Alwyn was so distracted at the state in which he found his poor brother that he never laid any plans at all. When I joined him he couldn’t hardly speak of him. ’Twas the heaviest punishment of all, he said.”
“Ah, poor young gentleman,” said Mrs Stroud; “it’s a sad business, and I doubt he’s not long for this world. But do I take you to say, Harry, that you’re a family man?”
Harry nodded, and produced a photograph of his wife and baby, and another of the substantial house in which he lived; and over the tea a great many more questions and answers were interchanged. Harry heard all about his sisters, and where Florence was, and what his brother George was doing. He couldn’t help enjoying the joke of appearing to his aunt in so new a light—even while he asked with real affection after Mattie, and studied the photographs of his family in his aunt’s book. He could not make himself known to his father, he said, until Mr Alwyn had taken some action, and, of course, he could not but hope that the explanation of the lost jewels would be accepted at Ashcroft.
His coming to see his aunt had been, he said, a sudden thought, prompted by Mr Alwyn’s shock and distress at his brother’s illness.
“I didn’t know then what I might find at the old place,” he said. “But if you could keep my coming quiet for a few days, aunt, it would be all for the better.”
“Well, Henry,” said Mrs Stroud, “there’s nothing declares to me that you’re a reformed character so much as your coming and consulting me, as was your true friend in the past always. It’s a lucky thing that Stroud has gone down the line to-day to his cousin’s funeral. I’ll keep your secret, Harry, though the thought of you, sitting there so broad-shouldered, and so well-to-do looking, is so amazing that I feel as if it would ooze out of me at the seams of my gown!”
“Well, aunt,” said Harry, “you’re very good, and I hope in a couple of days the concealment will be over.”
“It’s well,” said Mrs Stroud, “that that unlucky Florrie knows nothing of it, or she’d have controverted your intentions to a dead certainty.”