“Who is she? I’ve never seen her.”
“She’s a dear, kind creature, and very rich. But she’s very old, and doesn’t go about at all. She wants to let her place ‘The Briars’. Now you want a change, and it would be good for your business to have a place near town where you could invite your more important clients.”
“Oh, no, no. I——”
“Listen. If Madame de Vicenza would let this place for a song, as I think she would, you must take my advice, and rent it for the summer. I have an idea that by-and-by you might turn your business into a company—when you’ve worked it up a bit, you know, and make something out of the sale. You must just let them know, therefore, that you’re at ‘The Briars,’ and I bet you anything you like you’ll have a circle of some sort round you in no time, out of which you shall form your company.”
But poor Audrey shrank in alarm from these glowing enterprises, which Mr. Candover appeared to evolve so easily, and to realise so quickly.
For a long time it was in vain he talked to her, pointed out how right he had been about her taking the business world by storm with her showrooms, insisted on the duty which devolved upon her of making money for Gerard’s sake.
But it was inevitable that, alone as she was but for his help and advice, she should yield at last to his representations; and when he had ascertained for her that the rent she would have to pay for “The Briars” was a mere nominal one, provided she would consent to take on the duchess’s servants, Audrey reluctantly consented to take the pretty house at Epsom from the first week in August, when the London season ended and her showrooms were practically shut up, to the first week in October, which was, so Mademoiselle Laure assured her, early enough to begin the autumn fashion campaign.
Young and inexperienced as she was, Audrey could not help thinking, when she found herself in possession at “The Briars,” which was a charming house, roomy and tastefully furnished, without any appearance of ostentatious luxury, that she had found everything wonderfully easy so far in her new career.
Mademoiselle Laure was disagreeable, it was true, but she was undoubtedly something of a genius, and she had taken all the real work off her employer’s hands. Nothing transpired to clear up the mystery of the lady in white, but not the most minute search on Audrey’s part revealed any trace of the tragedy she believed herself to have discovered, nor did anything appear in the daily papers, which she scanned closely for the next week, to throw light upon the affair.
And scarcely was Audrey settled in the house at Epsom, when callers began to arrive in sufficient numbers to justify Mr. Candover’s prediction that she would soon have a circle of her own.