The men left the room, Templeton going last, with the case containing the Luck. The candles still burned brightly, but half the light seemed to have been withdrawn from the room, now that the great jewel no longer gleamed on the table; it was as if a cloud had hidden the sun. Harry still held the key in his hand, looking curiously at its chased and intricate wards, and for a few moments neither spoke. Then he put it into his pocket, and, pushing his chair a little farther from the table, flung one leg over the other.
"I propose to stop here four or five days, Uncle Francis," he said, "but not more, unless we can not get through our business. But, indeed, I can not see what there is to do. The place looks in admirable order, thanks to you. There is the box hedge; that is positively all I can see that wants looking to."
Mr. Francis laughed gaily.
"Dear Harry," he said, "if you are not careful you will become as absurd on the subject of this box hedge as you are in danger of becoming about the Luck. The dear, quaint, picturesque thing! How can you want it trimmed and cut?"
Harry laughed.
"As you say, it does not frighten you or me, or the gardeners," he said; "but, as I was about to tell you as we drove from the station, when something put it out of my head, I shall have to consider others as well."
Suddenly he stopped. In the intense pleasure with which he had looked forward to the visit of Evie and Lady Oxted—which should be, so he had figured it, hardly less welcome to his uncle, as a sign, visible and pertinent, of how utterly dead and discredited was the lying rumour which at one time had so blackened him—he had not consciously reckoned with the moment of telling him. But he went on almost without a pause:
"At the end of the month Lady Oxted has promised to come and spend a Sunday here, and with her will come—O Uncle Francis, how long this or something of the sort has been delayed, and how patiently you have waited for it!—with her will come her niece, Miss Aylwin, who has just come to England from Italy."
He looked not at his uncle as he spoke, but, with a delicacy unconscious and instinctive, kept his eyes on the ground. Such an announcement as the visit of Harold Harmsworth's sister must, he knew, be momentous to the old man, and perhaps would give rise to an emotion which it was not fit that other eyes should see. His uncle would know that in the mind of one at least most intimately connected with the tragedy, suspicion was not. This visit would be a reconciliation, formal though silent. It was right that the hearer should have as great a privacy as might be, and so, both when he spoke and after he had finished speaking, Harry kept his eyes on the ground.