“Please write to me. I have just seen you, but dared not let you know I was here. Please do not forget me, for I shall not forget you. And pray do not leave off loving me, for I cannot leave off loving you.
“Stella Cranstoun.”
She folded the note, placed it in an envelope addressed to “Hilary Pritchard, Esq.,” and placed it in Dr. Netherbridge’s hands.
“You will give it to him, won’t you?” she asked, and he promised.
“Thank you, Dr. Netherbridge, and good-by!”
“You are surely not returning to the Chase alone? It must be half an hour’s walk, and it is so late.”
“Twenty minutes, as I walk it. And it isn’t half-past six yet. I will send Lord Carthew to his friend. Good-night!”
Before he could say another word she had fled from the room, passed swiftly out from the arched entrance to the inner yard on to the road, and disappeared in a bend of the way, leaving Dr. Netherbridge to ponder on the strange chance which had made him acquainted with the girl whom he had first seen as a helpless infant of not more than two days old, more than eighteen years before.
CHAPTER IX.
THE GYPSY’S PROPHECY.
“Let me cross your hand with a bit of silver, my pretty lady! Let me tell your fortune, deary—all about the fair young gentleman you love so true, and the dark one you won’t have, for all his gold and rank.”
The words, uttered in a hoarse, croaking voice close to Stella’s ear, as she sped through the trees of the park in the darkness, made her start and utter a little cry of fright. The terms, too, were so strangely appropriate to her own circumstances that it seemed as though they were spoken in response to her thoughts. Turning in considerable alarm, she perceived a few steps behind her the small, bent form of a very old woman, in appearance almost a centenarian, wrapped in a hooded cloak of some dark woollen material. From under the scattered white locks straying over her wrinkled brow an extraordinarily brilliant pair of eyes gleamed out, belying her apparent decrepitude, and carrying out still further the weird and witch-like effect of her whole appearance as she stood before Stella, leaning heavily on a stick, with skinny, trembling fingers.