“Let me be moved at once to my house in Berkeley Square.”
“Impossible. It would be madness to move you in your present state.”
“Shall I die?”
“I hope not. I cannot say. But you must be prepared.”
“He won’t die, doctor, dear, until I have spoken to him,” put in the old crone, pressing close to the wounded man’s pillows. “That’s what he’s waiting for. He’s waiting to hear the voice of old Sarah Carewe, whose son he murdered, and whose grandchild’s heart he broke; the voice he heard cursing him outside the court-house, where he swore James Carewe’s liberty away. But James Carewe has been even with you, Philip Cranstoun, for it was he who drove your cab to-day. And Clare, my dear grandchild, will rest in her grave when she knows how I’ve carried out her prayer to bring up your children to hate and to disgrace you when those twin girls, Stella and Lura Cranstoun, were born to her. I let you keep the one, and you well-nigh broke her heart as you broke her mother’s. But old Sarah saved her, and she’ll marry her own young spark, the farmer, while I’ll wager my little Lura will set all tongues wagging with her doings. She’s an imp of evil even I can’t manage, and she’s been trained to hate you as I do. Romanys have good memories, Sir Philip Cranstoun. Old Sarah told you she would live to laugh at you as you lay dying in a garret, and her words have come true!”
Her voice rose to a shriek of triumph on her last words, and there was a fiendish glee in the shrill laugh that accompanied them. The dying man turned his head aside with a shudder of repugnance, and motioned to the doctor to approach him.
“Stella, my daughter Stella; I want her,” he whispered. “Where is she?”
The doctor turned to the old woman, who, as though exhausted by the excitement of the moment for which she had waited so long, had sunk upon a chair, looking extraordinarily old and feeble.
“Oh, he can see her if she likes,” she mumbled. “His bullying days are over.”
Not until late that same evening could Stella be found, Brian Carewe having applied in vain at the lodgings in Duchess Street, where she had been placed by old Sarah after the latter had brought her, drugged and insensible, in the caravan to London. But Brian had the gypsy instinct of tracking, and enlisting the aid of his nephew, Stephen Lee, who had long ago discovered the fraud perpetrated upon Lord Carthew, he sought out the address of Hilary Pritchard, and through him that of the latter’s aunt, in whose care Stella had been placed that day.