Aliette, her face pale above the high black mourning frock, stood irresolute in the doorway.
"I'm so sorry if I'm interrupting," she said. "I thought you'd gone, Sir Peter. I'll go away if you're talking business."
"We are talking business, dear lady," purred the baronet, playing with his acquired paper-knife. "Business which affects you more than anybody." And he looked at Ronnie as though to say, "Surely you'll consent to my consulting the person most concerned."
Ronnie signaled acquiescence; Jimmy closed the door; Aliette sat down; and Sir Peter began to speak.
At first Aliette could not grasp what the baronet was talking about. For three days now, her mind, still numb from the shock of Julia's sudden passing, had been obsessed by its own problems. Ronnie, she knew, was keeping some secret from her--as she from him. His secret, she guessed vaguely, must be in connection with his mother's book. Hers----
Gradually Sir Peter's words became comprehensible. He was reading Julia Cavendish's will. In so far as Aliette could understand the peculiar legal phraseology, Julia Cavendish had left everything to Ronnie. It struck her as curious that Sir Peter should go to all that trouble. Curious, too, that both Ronnie and his friend should look so worried! Ronnie would be even more worried if he knew that----
"That is the will," Sir Peter's voice interrupted the disturbing thought, "as my firm drafted it some years ago. But that will has been altered. Perhaps, before I read the alteration, I'd better explain to you about the book."
Now Aliette grew conscious of a question in her lover's eyes. The eyes never left her face. James Wilberforce, too, was eying her in a way that she could not understand. And suddenly Ronnie laid a hand upon her shoulder.
Sir Peter went on; "As you probably know, Mrs. Cavendish finished a novel just before she died. I have not yet read the manuscript of that novel, but it appears, from what my son and your--er--husband, who have read it, tell me, that the book is a roman à clef. A roman à clef, as I need hardly explain to you, dealing, as it does, with living people, sometimes results in a libel action. It is, among other things, to provide against the possibility of such a libel action that Mrs. Cavendish, without my firm's knowledge, altered her will."
"A libel action, Sir Peter?" Aliette's question was automatic.