“What are you going to do?” she whispered.
“I am going to try home influence, your influence, if you will help us.”
“Of course.”
“Put on your things.” He looked at his watch. “We have twenty-eight minutes before the train starts. No time to lose. If by to-night we are not in the way to recover the jewels we must trust to the police.”
Deborah ran to the door, but, with her fingers on the handle, she turned with a white face.
“Mamma!” she whispered, scarcely doing more than form the words with her lips, “she is outside.”
She rattled the handle, but still she heard the sound of heavy breathing on the other side. At last, very gently, she opened the door, and found, as she had begun to fear, Mrs. Pennant on her knees, with half-closed eyes, in a kind of fit. The old lady had known that an attempt would be made to keep from her something concerning her son, and had had recourse to eavesdropping to find out the truth.
“I can’t go up to London now,” said Deborah quietly, but in a tone of despair.
“We will see,” said the earl.
Before she could say another word he was out of the house. In five minutes the family doctor had arrived, and in ten minutes Mrs. Kemp, the admiral’s widow, was standing by the bed to which her old friend had been carried. It was a stroke of paralysis, the first, and not a very severe one. Within an hour Mrs. Pennant had recovered sufficiently to remember what she had heard, and to insist on her adopted daughter’s going up to town.