"There are fine sights, too, in San Pietro, Miranda—our land. I can remember now the colours that the Yeldo hills take in the evening; the sea, too, is beautiful in the bay, and we also have the storms that you love to watch so much.
"Besides," she went on, "you may return, but I—never. I, too, had a 'mission'; it is nearly over now, and I must stay with my child. No—don't pity me, Miranda; the time of tears is long past, but the grief is here still. But we won't talk of my mission. This is not the time for troubling your royal little head over the long-ago affairs of an old woman."
With arms linked affectionately they walked down to the house.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PANIC OF A CARPET MANUFACTURER
In the spacious library of Mr. Jasper Jarman's house, "Holmstrand," in a respectable suburb of Kidderminster, the wealthy carpet manufacturer was sitting at his ease. On a tiny table drawn up to the fire stood a silver coffee service and a small decanter of brandy. Across his knee lay the unopened copy of the Midland Echo which had just been delivered.
Indifferently he took it up and turned to the market reports, reading the comments from the London correspondent through carefully. Then he read half a report of a divorce case, then—he read the paragraph that had caused his nephew by marriage to laugh for ten minutes in the Union Hotel at Penzance.
But the news that the flower of Scotland Yard were following up with a keen interest the movements of himself, Jasper Jarman, and his wife since their eventful departure from Adderbury Cottage was not calculated to draw a like explosion of mirth from the elderly gentleman taking his after-dinner ease in his library at "Holmstrand." Perhaps Mr. Jasper Jarman was deficient in his sense of humour.
He skimmed through the account hurriedly, then starting up from his leather arm-chair he walked to the door and turned the key. For some reason for which he would have found it difficult to account he walked on tiptoe. Then he took the paper, and standing under the cluster of electric bulbs that hung from the centre of the ceiling, he read the report again, carefully this time, assimilating every point.