But Pamela looked intently into her face.
“Yes, you do know more than that. You know a great deal more,” she said, with depressed conviction. “I noticed the way you looked at him when he came in to take us away. Oh, Mrs. Angmering, what are we going to do? We seem to have neither father nor mother now!”
“We shall have to go back to Miss Willett’s,” sobbed Babs.
Audrey drew both the girls close to her.
“You shall be well taken care of, and you shall not have to go away with your aunt, at any rate,” said she.
And in the shuddering silence with which the girls received this assurance there was evidence enough that they understood vaguely that they had escaped some great danger.
In the meantime the two gentlemen who had got out of the waiting cab in time to witness the arrest of Mr. Candover’s three friends, had followed the two girls into the house and up the stairs, and had been received by Gerard and his cousins, who, standing back for the young girls to go up with Audrey, came forward again, to greet the gentlemen with intense astonishment.
“My father! By Jove!” cried Geoffrey, as Lord Clanfield came up, looking about him uneasily, as if he expected trap-doors to fly open under his feet and secret panels to slide back on each side of him.
“And Mr. Masson!” exclaimed Gerard, as he recognised, in the gentleman who was following close at his uncle’s heels, the solicitor whom Audrey had reported as having received her narrative so coldly.
The two gentlemen had by this time reached the little landing upon which opened the small room where so many exciting interviews had taken place that morning.