“Then I didn’t want you to know!” she sobbed. “Captain Grey—he sat there with me. Lexy! Lexy! I didn’t know there was any one like him in the world! I wanted to stay, then. I thought, if you found out, I’d have to go away—to go home again, or to marry Charles. I’d promised to marry him, Lexy, but I can’t! Not now!”
“Hush, darling!” said Lexy hastily.
This was something Captain Grey had no right to hear, but he did hear it. He was still standing outside the door, motionless.
“He was so kind!” Caroline went on. “And his face—”
“Never mind that!” Lexy interrupted sternly. “Tell me how you got away.”
“When he came back, he found George there—I had to call him George.”
“Yes, I see. Never mind!”
“George went away, and then—he told me. He said his wife had died a few months ago, and that in her will she’d left some jewel—a ruby—”
“An emerald,” corrected Lexy.
“Yes—it was an emerald. She’d left it to her brother, and he—Dr. Quelton—had taken it long ago, and sold it, to get money for his horrible drugs. She never knew that, and he didn’t tell her lawyer that she’d died. I don’t know how he managed, or what he did, but nobody knew. Then there came a letter from her brother, to say that he was coming; and the doctor said—I’ll never forget it: