“Well, there’s no such person. I asked everywhere, and at last I found a good-natured chap who looked the name up in the directory. There’s no doctor of that name about here.”
Audrey listened with keen ears.
“I was sure of it!” she said. “Dr. Fendall was the man Johnson. And being one of the gang, of course he saw nothing, or said he saw nothing, no trace of the woman in the white dress!”
The number of uncanny revelations which were forced upon them made them all feel sick and shivery. They made no further objection therefore to Geoffrey’s proposition, and he had left them on his errand when, on reaching the bottom of the stairs, he suddenly ran up again to report the surprising intelligence that there were “two awfully pretty girls outside, in a hansom, asking for Madame Rocada”.
Audrey uttered a little cry.
“It must be Pamela and her sister—his daughters!” cried she in consternation. “Oh, what shall we do?”
There was upon them all a terrible sense of the difficulty of the position in which they were being placed. But Gerard whispered:—
“There’s nothing to be done now but for you to see them and see what they want. They are coming upstairs now. Go and meet them.”
Audrey, trembling from head to foot, obeyed, and going out of the room, saw that Pamela and Barbara, smiling but shy, were standing at the top of the stairs, looking about them.
They uttered little cries of delight when they saw Audrey, who ran up to them and kissed them both, scarcely able to speak in consequence of the vivid emotion caused by their arrival at such a moment.