Let us follow him upstairs to the small suite of rooms which had been set apart for him by his uncle’s wish. These consisted of a sitting-room where he smoked, a bedroom adjoining, and a little ante-room which had a stone balcony overlooking the park.
John Temple went into his sitting-room, which opened from a corridor, and having pushed the door nearly close behind him, he pulled out his letter and began reading May’s fond tender words with a smile.
Then suddenly his face darkened.
“We have been all greatly interested,” he read, “about a diamond robbery, which, I dare say, you have seen in the newspapers. The maid of the popular and, I believe, pretty actress, Miss Kathleen Weir, had stolen her mistress’ diamonds and substituted false ones instead of them. How we came to hear so much about it is that Mr. Webster, the nephew of the Miss Websters, was one of the barristers in the case for the prosecution and Miss Kathleen Weir was so pleased by the way Mr. Webster conducted it that she invited him to her house. He says she is handsome and clever, but not exactly what he calls ‘nice.’ But all the same I think he rather admires her, and their acquaintance seems to progress, in spite of the alarm of his dear old aunts! Did you ever see her? Some time when you are in town—and when is that dear time to be?—you must take me to see her act.”
John Temple went on frowning as he read these innocent words. Here was a mine under his feet indeed! He knew the nature of Kathleen Weir; the outspoken frank nature, that was just as likely as not to confide her whole history to a stranger. What if she told of her early marriage to this Webster, who might repeat it to his aunts? He had warned the Misses Webster to keep his marriage to May a secret, and May did not bear his name. Still in some moment the old ladies might reveal it to their nephew, and then no one could tell where the mischief might end.
John Temple flung the letter on the table and began walking restlessly up and down the room, thinking what it would be best to do. “She must leave Pembridge Terrace at once,” he decided. But then, how could this be arranged? If he went up to town he might meet Webster, and May was too young and girlish to go about house-seeking alone.
“That confounded woman,” he thought bitterly of Kathleen Weir, “is forever in my way.”
He was full of impatience, chafing against fate and the mad folly of his youth. The door of the bedroom beyond was standing open, and farther still he could see from the balcony window of the ante-room a green patch of the park. He went into this ante-room, opened the window and stepped out on the balcony, still cursing his ill-luck. He did not see, as he leaned over the balustrade, that someone had entered his sitting-room, on the table of which the letter from May was lying open.
Yet this was so. Moved by curiosity, and a more subtle feeling still, Mrs. Temple had followed him upstairs, shortly after he had left the breakfast room. She sometimes—not often—went into his sitting-room if she had anything that she wished particularly to say to him, and something prompted her to go into it now. The door was very slightly ajar, and she pushed it open and entered the room, and in a moment her eyes fell on the open letter on the table.
She made a step forward and looked at it. Then she read the words with which it commenced: