“Poor? The letter to my brother is from the wealthiest banker of our acquaintance, the safest and surest. And his statement proves you anything but poor.”
Then Rosalie remembered the jewels she had found, and remained silent. She had prized them very much and loved them, and now she understood their value, in one of those flashes of perception that occasionally comes to all of us.
After that Sir John went away, and Miss Crokerly led the way into the dining-room, where breakfast was laid for Rosalie only, as the others had long since had theirs.
And that day passed away as healthily and normally as Rosalie could wish, and a morning’s shopping was quite a pleasant recreation to her, and in fact the first of its kind she had ever indulged in in her life.
For to be dumb is a great drawback, as most of us can understand, and curtails most pleasures, little or big.
And then for tea some very interesting people dropped in, or so Rosalie found them, and altogether the weary, dead, dull, lonely level of life seemed to have vanished.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE SCANDAL OF THE TEMPLE
Now it chanced one night that Miss Crokerly wrote a letter after the bag had gone to post, and Rosalie, seeing that it was dry and frosty, had offered to take it to the pillar-box, which was a few minutes’ walk away at the end of the next square. It was so pleasant out of doors that she took the longest way, and having slipped the letter in the box, prepared to take the same road back.
On turning a corner, her attention was attracted by someone coming towards her, scarcely fifty yards away, reading a letter, so it seemed to her, with apparently no more trouble than if it had been daylight. But that fact, though it afterwards occurred to her, was forgotten in the shock of recognising that here was Mr. Barringcourt.
Rosalie stood still under the gas-lamp, unable to move, paralysed with fear. An instinct of safety should have made her move along, but here she stood, courting observation by standing directly in the path, with big wide eyes fixed upon his face. Just then he looked up with bent brows and eyes. They came directly in contact with Rosalie’s white and terrified face. In an instant his abstracted air vanished, and a very present alertness took the place of his thoughts. Like a flash of lightning Rosalie turned and sped the near way home, reaching the safety of the doorstep in less than three minutes. She did not stop to breathe till safe within the friendly shelter of the hall, where something told her to regain a little composure, at any rate, before appearing before Miss Crokerly. She went upstairs and removed her hat and the rich evening wrap she had drawn round her, sat down for a little while to recover her breath, and then descended to the drawing-room again.