Such was the home-coming of Rupert Ullershaw.
CHAPTER IV.
A BUSINESS CONVERSATION
Edith, who was not an early riser, breakfasted in her own room. At half-past nine on the morning following Rupert’s arrival the maid as usual brought up her tray, a newspaper—the Morning Post—and three letters. Two of these were of a sort with which she was very familiar, unpaid millinery bills, but the third was addressed in Lord Devene’s unmistakable handwriting, that was of as hard and uncompromising an appearance as his own face. Throwing aside the bills with a shrug of her rounded shoulders, she opened her noble relative’s epistle. It was brief and to the point:
Dear Edith,—Come round after breakfast if you can. I shall be in till 10.45, and wish to speak to you.—
Yours,
Devene.
“Bother!” she said, as she laid it down. “I shall have to scurry through my dressing and take a cab. Well, he must pay for it. I wonder what he wants.”
Lord Devene now lived at Grosvenor Square. Even in the minds of the most progressive latter-day agnostics primeval superstitions are apt to linger. Perhaps it was some sentiment of the sort which causes an African savage to burn the hut where a death has occurred and build himself a new one, that induced Lord Devene to sell the Portland Place house after the tragic decease of his first wife, at far below its value, and buy himself another, though it is fair to add that the reason he gave for the transaction was the state of the domestic drains. However this may have been, Lady Devene Number Two never slept in the haunted chamber of Lady Devene Number One.
At 10.46 precisely Edith paid off her cab at the spacious steps of the Grosvenor Square mansion.
“Is Lord Devene in?” she asked of the butler, the same quiet, dark individual who had filled the office years ago in Portland Place.