“I guess I’ll try whether I can’t do it myself, Mr. Wylie,” she said, looking up at him archly and holding out a dainty handkerchief. “Blindfold me instead of Miss Ewart, and see if I’m not just as sharp at finding the pin.”
She made such fun of the whole process that even Bruce Wylie himself failed to notice that Evereld calmly walked up the broad staircase in sight of them all, and she was safely locked into her room before any one had bestowed a thought upon her absence.
“I shall always love American girls!” she said to herself. “How quick she was to understand, I only wish I could thank her, but that’s impossible. Somehow I must get away from this place. I daren’t stay longer. If only I knew how best to escape and where to go to! There is Mrs. Hereford. She would take care of me. But Ireland is so far away, and I fear they would overtake me before I could get to her. Shall I go to London and make Bridget take me away to some quiet little country place where no one could hear of us? Or there is Southbourne, but term will not begin till next week, and the whole house would be deserted, it would be no use going there.” None of these plans seemed very promising. To whom could she turn?
Restlessly pacing up and down her room, she prayed for guidance, and almost immediately a well-known name floated into her mind. “Why!” she exclaimed, “I wonder I never thought of that before.”
She stepped out on to the balcony, entered Minnie’s room, took from the table a continental Bradshaw, and returning once more, sat down resolutely to puzzle out a route as well as she could. It was no easy matter for one unversed in the mysteries of railway guides; she found herself terribly baffled by two places with almost exactly similar names, and she floundered long in that wilderness of day trains and night trains, and dark and light figures, which prove traps for the inexperienced. If so much had not depended upon it she could have laughed over her perplexities, but as it was she came perilously near to crying over the Bradshaw, and nothing but dread of Bruce Wylie and the thought of Ralph enabled her to plod on until at last she had puzzled out her way of escape. The trains were not so favourable to her plans as she had hoped. It was impossible to leave till the middle of the next morning, and the journey would involve four or five changes of trains, and a night at a hotel. It seemed impossible to go straight through to her destination.
“If I go to a hotel,” she reflected, “I must have some sort of luggage or they will suspect me. I will take my little handbag from here and some cloak straps in my pocket; then at Geneva I will buy some wraps and make up a respectable-looking bundle.”
By this time her hopes had revived and her courage had returned. She put back the Bradshaw in Minnie’s room, closed her shutters, bolted her window and began to make her preparations in a thoughtful, womanly way.
Fortunately she had had no expenses in Switzerland, and still carried about her the eighteen five pound notes which Bridget had counselled her not to leave behind. In her purse she had also an English sovereign and a little Swiss silver money. “I need not change a note till I get to Geneva, that is a comfort,” she reflected, and having carefully destroyed all her letters and packed a few necessaries into her bag, she crept to bed and did her best to sleep, but not very successfully.
The next morning she could most truthfully plead a headache as an excuse for not attending Lady Mount Pleasant’s picnic, indeed she remained in bed; and looked so white and tired when Janet and Minnie came to see her that they reported her as quite unfit for the expedition, and only in a state to be left quiet and alone.
“Well,” said Sir Matthew, with a look of annoyance, “it can’t be helped. She will be right enough to-morrow when her decision is made and everything has settled down quietly.”