Alarmed by something unexpected and uncanny in her manner, Sir Philip took Dakin apart, and gave orders that for the rest of the evening Miss Cranstoun was to be closely watched, but allowed apparent liberty of action.
“Does she seem to you at all light-headed?” he asked, and Dakin owned that that idea had occurred to her.
“Let her move about the house,” Sir Philip said, “always, of course, with one or two persons within call. Fretting and starving in that foolish way have pulled her down badly.”
All the watching during that evening, however, fell to Dakin’s share, for handsome Stephen Lee presented himself in the servants’ hall, and made such open love to Ellen that that young woman forgot everything in the joy of her supposed conquest.
Finding that she was able to leave her room unmolested, and remembering well old Sarah’s promise of help on the wedding eve, Stella took the opportunity while her father was at dinner of running lightly down the broad oak staircase toward the hall door. Here she paused a moment, and then suddenly, with trembling fingers and thumping heart, she drew back the bolt of the door.
Dakin was close behind her, although she knew it not; and Dakin followed her young mistress out on the terrace, hiding in the shadow of the doorway, and watched her hesitate a moment, and then speed across the grass to where the woods began, and lose herself among the gathering shadows.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE CHARM.
Stella’s sudden disappearance startled Dakin.
She had believed the girl to be too seriously ill to attempt to run away. But, after all, as she told herself, stepping gingerly on to the wet grass after her errant charge, Miss Cranstoun couldn’t go very far. Still she was nervous. Sir Philip had given particular orders that his daughter should have more liberty this evening, but he had said nothing about permitting her to stray about the grounds.
Mrs. Dakin was not wholly inhuman, although of a mean, hard, vulgar, and sordid nature. She had been promised five and twenty pounds, to be divided between her and Ellen, to whom she decided that the odd five pounds should go as soon as the wedding ceremony was over, and she wanted to earn it. At the same time Stella’s appearance this evening had been so strange, her eyes had appeared so unnaturally large and bright, and her face of so waxen and unhealthy a pallor, that the spy had serious misgivings as to whether she would be alive and in her right mind for the ceremony of the morrow. Consequently, she had decided that a little fresh air might do the girl good, and as Stella was wearing a white woollen shawl over her shoulders, there was no particular danger of her catching a cold, even though the evening was damp and chilly.