"To get Miss Vera Galloway home—or rather, to get her out of the hospital," Jessie said. "If we don't, we shall have Countess Saens finding her there. She is certain to call at the hospital some time to-day—probably this morning. If we can be first, well and good. If you can go down with me on pretence of business and profess to recognize Miss Galloway for somebody else so much the better. Then you can say that she is fit to travel, and there is an end of it."
The doctor grinned with a comic expression of dismay.
"Well, you are a nice kind of young lady!" he said. "A pretty proposition truly to a man in my exalted position! Why, if the truth came out it would ruin me. But I suppose you expect to get your own way. Only you can't take Miss Galloway home."
"I don't propose to take her home," Jessie said eagerly. "Lord and Lady Merehaven think that their real niece is staying with the Queen of Asturia for a day or two in the place of an absent woman-in-waiting. To take Vera home would be to spoil everything. Besides, we should have to account in some way for her sprained ankle, and it is quite imperative that nobody should know of that."
"What a clever girl you are!" Varney muttered admiringly. "I begin to see what you are driving at. Go on."
"There is very little more to say," Jessie murmured. "I shall pose as a relation of Vera's—calling myself by my proper name of Harcourt, of course. Dressed in her plain black—or rather in my plain black and veil—I shall convey Vera to the queen's hotel and there change clothes. I shall just walk out of the hotel and vanish for the time being, and there you are! The real Vera will be with the queen. She can nurse her ankle for a day or two, and nobody will be any the wiser."
Varney loudly applauded the suggestion. It was just possible, he said, that he was going to get himself into serious trouble, but he was not going to back out of it now. If Jessie would go down to the hospital and see Vera Galloway, he would follow after a discreet interval.
It all fell out exactly as Jessie had hoped. There was little the matter with Vera save for the fact that her ankle was very troublesome, though one of the house surgeons dismissed the idea of the patient being moved for the next day or two. When the discussion was still on Varney came in. He approached the matter in his own quick and breezy fashion.