"The wrong door?" Wallace repeated, with a clearly startled expression in his eyes. "Do you mean that you went into the lumber-room? Wasn't the door locked?"
"Yes—no—that is to say, I fell over a box or something near the door, and slipped and hurt myself in the dark! And, being very absurdly nervous, it gave me such a shock!"
Laline glanced at Clare and then at Mr. Armstrong. It was clear that Clare was lying, and equally clear that he knew it. There was nothing for him to do, however, but to express his regret at her accident, and to suggest that a glass of wine or a little brandy might assist in restoring her nerves—a proposition to which Clare assented without much protest; and the three proceeded to the dining-room together.
Here they found Mrs. Vandeleur inspecting the choicest curiosity of the bank—a centenarian clerk, who had been employed there for over eighty-five years, and who invariably alluded to his septuagenarian employer as "Master Alec."
"I've been here, man and boy, for nigh on eighty-six years," he was piping, as Wallace and the young ladies entered, "and disgrace has only once come upon the bank since I entered it! That was Master Wallace, to be sure. Oh, he's quiet enough now—butter wouldn't melt in his mouth! But he's a rank bad 'un—a rank bad 'un; and so I've always told Master Alec! Never trust him is what I've always said. Wine or whiskey, women or money, he can't resist any of 'em, for all he looks so quiet. He's a bad man, sir—a bad man is Wallace Armstrong!"
Laline heard every word, and turned to look at Wallace. He flushed and lowered his eyes under her inquiring gaze. Presently, drawing her apart, he confided to her in a whisper that old Farquharson was "quite off his head, and hadn't a notion what he was talking about."
A little later the ladies left, after being pressed by old Mr. Wallace to fix an early date for another visit, and drove home through the snow-covered streets in the early gloom of a winter's evening.
Clare was unusually quiet on the return journey; and it was only after the girls had retired to their rooms that night that she crept into Laline's room, looking very ghostly in her loose white flannel dressing-gown, with her long reddish-gold hair falling about her shoulders.
"Aren't you longing to know about my ghost-fright this evening?" she asked. "Of course I didn't tell Mr. Armstrong the truth. The fact is he's got some one in that other room he's keeping quiet—some one who rushed out at me in the dark with a sort of curse, and threw me out of the room. It was a woman, of course, and I suppose she was jealous, and that would account for her savagery."
"Clare," exclaimed Laline, "are you inventing this? How can I tell that you are speaking the truth now?"