CHAPTER V
When Jane awoke the next morning she stared for a moment at the brownish spot in the ceiling just over her bed, as she had done every morning during a series of London seasons. It was a sprawling indefinite stain, caused no doubt by some leak long since stopped in the roof overhead, but it possessed in Jane's eyes the weird peculiarity of assuming various pictorial shapes which matched the girl's own passing experiences. Once she remembered seeing in it a train of gypsy wagons, with a peculiarly alluring and picturesque gypsy plodding on before—this in the days when she longed to run away, yet did not quite dare for fear of being caught and brought back ignominiously to taste the sharp sting of the ferrule, which lay darkly in wait for evil doers in the upper left-hand drawer of Lady Agatha's private desk.
Of late years the stain had assumed the appearance of a mountain valley, with a lofty castle perched high amid inaccessible cliffs. There was a long series of romances connected with this imaginary abode, in every one of which Jane herself, in a robe of white samite, bound about the waist with a girdle of red gold, figured as heroine. Sometimes a hostile army, their spears and pennants showing dimly through the trees, would defile stealthily through the dark passes, to intrench themselves before the castle moat, where Jane would parley with them, intrepid and unblenching in a glistening coat of chain armor fitting her lithe figure like a serpent's skin. Again, a solitary knight with closed visor overshadowed by ebon plumes could be seen pulling in his foaming charger below the embattled terraces awaiting a glimpse of the white figure above.
On this particular morning beetling cliffs, castle and all had vanished and Jane, rubbing the dreams from her eyes, beheld a wide expanse of tumbling ocean, with a sky piled high with flying clouds, and in the foreground, ploughing its way through the foam, a stately ship. Jane stared unwinkingly at the vision for a long minute, then her eyes descended in startled haste to the floor, where rested the locked and strapped box, with O. A. B. in white letters on its end. Jane sat up in the bed with a queer choking in her slender throat. If Oliver Aubrey-Blythe were alive, his one daughter would not be driven forth friendless into the wide world to make her difficult way.
Twenty minutes later, refreshed by her bath and dressed in the gown she had chosen for her travels, Jane was quite her cheerful self again. She was also unromantically hungry, and after a brief period of indecision descended boldly to the breakfast room, where she was tolerably certain of finding none of the female members of the household.
Mr. Robert Aubrey-Blythe was apparently just about finishing his repast and his newspaper. He looked up as his niece entered the room. "Good morning, Jane," he said fussily. "You are late."
"Yes, Uncle Robert," very meekly, "I overslept this morning."
"I—er—in short, Jane, I saw Towle again yesterday, at the Club," pursued Mr. Aubrey-Blythe, thoughtfully gazing at the girl through his double eyeglasses. "The man is—er—quite daft about you, Jane. I own I was astonished. Ha-ha! very amusing, I'm sure."