‘My heart is sad and heavy,
In this merry month of May,
As I stand beneath the lime-tree
On the bastion old and gray.’
‘This moment’ has come. As Mrs. Denis, routed, but by no means vanquished, disappears hastily round one corner of the pretty cottage, someone else comes round the other. A young girl, singing sweetly, merrily, though in a subdued voice. Just as she reaches her corner she looks behind her; her singing ceases, and an amused look brightens her face—a face that has known much sadness. Again she looks behind her, as if expecting something, this time turning her back on Wyndham; and now, a moment later, a huge dog tears across the grass and literally flings himself upon the girl, whose tall but slender frame seems to give way beneath his canine embraces. For a second only; then she recovers herself, her pliant body sways forward, and, catching the dog’s handsome head in her arms, a merry tussle ensues between them. It is almost a dance, so agile is the girl, so bent is the dog on entering into the spirit of the fun with all his heart.
Wyndham, watching, feels no sense of amusement. Indignation is still full upon him, and now it grows more intense as he sees the dog—his dog—a brute hitherto devoted to himself, lavishing its affection upon an utter stranger.
He makes an impatient movement, which the dog’s quick eye sees, and, bolting from his late companion, he comes bounding towards Wyndham, from whom, it must be confessed, he gets but a poor welcome.
The girl, turning, surprised at the dog’s desertion of her, becomes suddenly aware that there is someone beyond, and as Wyndham emerges into sight she makes a movement to fly, then stands stricken, as if turned to stone.
It is impossible, under the circumstances, but that she should be known to Wyndham; but as he looks at her he tells himself that, if he had not known that Denis had brought her down here on the morning of the Professor’s death, he would never have recognised her. Her dress, for one thing, is so different. Of course he had found time to send a cheque to Mrs. Moriarty before going abroad for the use of the ‘waif,’ as he had somehow called the girl to himself, not knowing her name—a sum handsome enough to dress her as the young heiress of a most unexpected three hundred a year should be dressed—and it comes to him now that the ‘waif’ had not been slow in the spending of it. No doubt Mrs. Moriarty had been the ‘middle man,’ but the ‘waif’ had known what she was about, or else some well-born instinct had directed her.
‘Well born!’ Pah! A poor, miserable girl like that, with a shawl thrown over her head when first he saw her—and yet, her face, her feet——