She recalled his words uttered on the last evening before he left home: “Cheap! Women are cheap.” That probably had been his attitude always in regard to women.
She turned back the cablegram and looked at the printed form attached to it. It was a cutting from an English newspaper containing a brief notice of Lucy Arnott’s death. Why, she wondered, had he kept the thing lying about loose in his drawer where any one might read it? She took it up, closed the desk, forgetting Dare and her intention to write to him, forgetting everything in face of this horrible ugly proof of Herbert’s treachery; and going up to her own room, she locked the cablegram away in the safe where she kept her jewels.
Chapter Twenty.
Oddly enough the first news of Blanche Maitland came to Mrs Carruthers through Dare.
He mentioned in a letter that he had been to a music-hall entertainment where to his amazement the sphinx-like young person, who was a paragon of all the virtues, was playing accompaniments for the members of a musical troupe, to which she apparently belonged.
“I understood she was fostering the Arnott babies,” he wrote. “You don’t keep me fully posted as to events, as you promised. I tried to get hold of her, but learnt that she had gone on to Pretoria. It is an odd life for a girl, but more amusing, possibly, than tending the future generation.”
Further on in the letter he said:
“I ran across Arnott in town—another surprise. He was very surly, and seemed to wish to avoid me, so I reconsidered my hospitable intention to ask him to lunch with me. How is She? If you don’t mention Her in your next letter I shall run down and pursue my own inquiries.”