“It ain’t ruined at all,” said Florence, “and I’ve found the letter for you, and here it is.”
“That’s nothing near so bad as the other letter what master’s got!” said poor Wyn.
“Now shut up, Wyn,” said his father. “Mr Alwyn’s at the house, and the matter’s out of your hands, which never ought to have been mixed up in it. Get you to bed at once. And what has brought Florence back again?”
“I went and carried on with Jim Blake and young Benson, and I set ’em on thinking the men in the wood were poachers, and when I found the letter in Miss Lily’s pocket, and saw it was Mr Alwyn and my brother, I thought I’d better run away than have their deaths on my shoulders. But I was settling down, Aunt Charlotte, I was indeed, and folding up the clothes quite regular.”
“Could a note be sent to tell the lady what is become of her?” said Harry. “I’ll go myself if that’s all; but it’s late, perhaps, to disturb them with a long story.”
“I’ll take the note,” said Ned Warren, who had been standing in the background, “if Bessie ’ll write it.”
Bessie accordingly indited a note in her mother’s name, in which she begged to inform her ladyship that Florence Whittaker had come home, but that circumstances had occurred in part to excuse her and that she (Mrs Warren) would wait on her ladyship the next morning with a full explanation.
This note despatched, Bessie good-naturedly went upstairs to bathe Wyn’s face and to hear Florence’s story, and to leave the elders free to come to an explanation with the returned stranger. “Would you be good enough,” said Harry, “to tell me what has occurred as to Mr Cunningham?”
“It’s just this,” said Charles Warren. “Strangers are scarce in these parts, and my boy and the girl took it into their heads as they must be after mischief, and chattered about what was none of their business to the two young fellows that Ned and I have got in to help us. So when they saw a stranger, as they expressed it, ferreting in a tree, they clapped him on the shoulder and asked him his business. He looked them in the face, as they put it, as cool as you please, and asked them if they thought he was looking for pheasants’ eggs in a hollow tree in August? Which they took for cheek, which it sounded like, and told him they’d walk him up here to me. So he says, says they, ‘I’m glad you mind your business so thoroughly. Just walk up to the house with me, and I’ll explain matters to Mr Cunningham myself.’ So they walked him up, and Jim Blake, who has the most gumption of the two, says he did begin to feel uncommon uncomfortable, and when they came to the garden side, there was the master on the terrace. So says their man, ‘There’s your master, alone, I think. We’ll go and speak to him at once.’ And he unlatched the gate, quite natural-like, and walks up to the terrace. And there they saw Mr Edgar lying, and he gave a start and held out his hands, and the master sent them off with a flea in the ear. And they come straight to me, full of misgivings; they’re new in these parts, but, of course, I knew who it must be at once.”
“It did sound like Mr Alwyn all over,” said Mrs Warren.