“What is she like?”
“An odd-looking old lady, my lord, and very oddly dressed.”
“Show her into the next room. I shall be with her directly.”
Finishing his cup of coffee and pea-fowl’s egg with deliberation, while he tried his best to recall in what connection he could have heard the name before, the marquis at length sauntered into the morning room in his dressing-gown, with the Times of the day before yesterday, just arrived, in his hand. There stood his visitor waiting for him, such as my reader knows her, black and gaunt and grim, in a bay window, whose light almost surrounded her, so that there was scarcely a shadow about her, and yet to the eyes of the marquis she seemed wrapped in shadows. Mysterious as some sybil, whose being held secrets the first whisper of which had turned her old, but made her immortal, she towered before him, with her eyes fixed upon him, and neither spoke nor moved.
“To what am I indebted——?” began his lordship; but Miss Horn speedily interrupted his courtesy.
“Own to nae debt, my lord, till ye ken what it’s for,” she said, without a tone or inflection to indicate a pleasantry.
“Good!” returned his lordship, and waited with a smile. She promised amusement, and he was ready for it—but it hardly came.
“Ken ye that han’ o’ wreet, my lord?” she inquired, sternly advancing a step, and holding out a scrap of paper at arm’s length, as if presenting a pistol.
The marquis took it. In his countenance curiosity had mingled with the expectation. He glanced at it. A shadow swept over his face but vanished instantly: the mask of impervious non-expression which a man of his breeding always knows how to assume, was already on his visage.
“Where did you get this?” he said quietly, with just the slightest catch in his voice.