‘She was very like my wife,’ he gasped faintly, and fell back and died.
It was all over. The doctors had taken their departure, and the old dismal house was very still. The Professor had died in the morning, and it was quite night again before Wyndham had time to think of ordinary matters. It was the presence of Denis, who had come up to see, probably, how his master had continued to live so long without him, that brought back the thought of the girl to Wyndham’s mind.
‘Where did you take her?’ he asked listlessly. Even as the words passed his lips he knew it was most important that she should be found again. She was now the inheritress of three hundred a year—no mean thing for a girl who only last night was ready and willing to die of want, amongst other things, no doubt.
‘To the Cottage, sir.’
‘To——’ Wyndham gazed at him as if too astonished to give way to the words that evidently lay very near to his tongue.
‘The Cottage, sir. Yer own place, sir.’
‘The Cottage,’ repeated Wyndham, now breaking forth in earnest. ‘What the devil did you take her there for?’
His extreme anger would have cowed perhaps any other servant in Europe save Denis. That good man stood to his guns without a flinch.
‘Fegs, sir, ’tis you can answer that,’ said he, with quite an encouraging air.