“Well then, you have taken a very sensible resolution, from your point of view. From mine, it seems a pity to give up a business which promised to work up into a first-rate one. In the meantime, I will see you safely as far as Mrs. Webster’s flat—Oh, I insist upon it. Even if you are anxious to throw all the blame for what has gone wrong upon my poor shoulders, as I think you are, you must not cut me off altogether, when I am still only too anxious to be of use to you in any possible way.”
Her protests were in vain. And poor Audrey began to feel, with a terrible sinking of the heart, that the words of the stranger were coming true, and that, try as she might to get out of range of Mr. Candover’s uncanny and mysterious influence, she would be drawn back, invisibly but surely, every time.
This impression was increased when they reached Mrs. Webster’s flat, for that good lady received them both with a broad smile of welcome, which was even more expansive for Mr. Candover than for his companion. Indeed it was evident that his gentle voice and insinuating manners had fascinated the widow, and Audrey soon perceived that it would be hopeless, as well as rash, to confide in her as to his suspected misdeeds.
And when she learned that Mr. Candover had called upon Mrs. Webster once or twice of late, Audrey felt another pang of the terrible fear that the net was tightly woven about her own feet. Every acquaintance, every friend she had seemed to have come, in one way or another, within his baleful influence.
She was, therefore, obliged to say nothing about the visit of the mysterious stranger, and she glossed over the treatment she had received from Lord Clanfield as much as she could. But again she noted uneasily that Mrs. Webster seemed to have been infected with the idea that Gerard had really been guilty of the forgery; and finding so little sympathy with her deepest feelings, Audrey toned down her discoveries at “The Briars” as much as she could, and dwelt more on the gambling than on the disputes which had resulted from it.
On the following morning Audrey went to the showrooms, with reluctance indeed but with a dogged resolution to go through the unpleasant business of bargaining with Mademoiselle Laure with spirit and keenness, not for her own sake only, but for that of Gerard.
If only this business had been unconnected with Mr. Candover and Marie Laure, and the adventure with the white lady, poor Audrey felt how gladly she would have had it to fall back upon, how proud she would have been to be able, by her own exertions and her own money, to do something towards making a home for Gerard and herself. As it was, she had sunk so much of her small capital in this business that, if she were to get nothing from it, she would have very little left, and no means of providing some sort of home in which to nurse her husband back to health and strength again.
So that it was with many a tremor that she re-entered the handsomely furnished rooms, where she found Marie Laure already returned from Paris, busily engaged in unpacking the new models which she had brought over, and affecting as much care and secrecy over them as if they had been royal robes.
Marie Laure received her effusively, though with the suspicious dryness under all her compliments which made Audrey mistrust them.
She refused to talk about business that morning, and insisted on enlisting Audrey’s services in the matter of the rearrangement of the rooms, and in sundry other matters which occupied them both until well into the afternoon, when, to Audrey’s annoyance, there streamed into the rooms, in twos and threes, but at very short intervals, quite a little crowd of the men who had been habitués at “The Briars” during her tenancy of the house.