"I don't rightly know, sir. He told me to mention the name Jabez."
"Jabez!" Barton jumped up with the alacrity of a man half his age. "Gerald! John! go into the drawing-room and entertain the ladies. I shall be engaged for the next half-hour in the library." And he vanished with the plethoric butler.
"Hullo! What's up with Uncle B.?" said Gerald.
Dundas shrugged his shoulders.
"One of his mysterious interviews, I suppose. He is a mystery in himself is Uncle Barton."
CHAPTER V.
BEHIND THE SCENES.
In the drawing-room, Mrs. Darrow, feeling it incumbent upon her to provide entertainment for those assembled, decided she could not do better than relate to them the history of her married life—how good and devoted she had been to a brutal husband, how she had been unable to buy a rag of clothing for quite six months at a time, and consequently had been obliged to go unfashionably clothed. How she could have married at least a dozen men who were dying for her. But how foolishly she had chosen the only one who never appreciated her, and much more to the same effect. Such a theme she held, more especially when adequately set forth and expatiated upon, must be all absorbing.
Hilda, it was true, had heard a vastly different version of her friend's connubial existence. She knew, in fact, that the late Mr. Darrow had been something more than glad to leave this sphere. But for the present that mattered not at all.