“It was you! Of course, if we are ruined you’ll lay all the blame on me. Men are all alike, from Adam down. It’s always the woman did it. The idea of her pretending to be deaf and listening to what we said! It’ll do no good to go up stairs to talk with Aunt Wroat, but I’ll make a last effort for the sake of my dear children.”
The well-mated pair went up to the door of Mrs. [Wroat’s] chamber, and knocked loudly for admittance. Peters replied to them through the key-hole:
“My mistress desires to be excused. She can bear no more excitement to-night. Besides, she is occupied with her niece.”
The lawyer tried the door fiercely: it was locked. Then he stooped, applying his mouth to the key-hole.
“Tell your mistress,” he said, in a sort of roar, “that that girl is an impostor, and no more her niece than she’s her grandfather. The girl is deceiving her—”
He paused discomfited as he heard the old lady hobble away into the inner room, followed by Lally.
“You’d better go down stairs,” advised Peters, through the medium Mr. Blight had employed. “May be you don’t know you are laying yourself liable to a suit for slander.”
“We had better go down,” said the lawyer. “The servants are collecting on the basement stairs to learn the cause of the hubbub. We’ll see Aunt Wroat in the morning, and convince her that she’s been taken in by a clever adventuress, but the girl goes to-night.”
With this resolve the couple returned to the drawing-room, leaving the door ajar that they might hear Lally’s return to her room. They waited hours, but they did not hear it. The servants retired to bed, and the clocks through the house struck twelve, and still Lally did not emerge from Mrs. Wroat’s room. The Blights crept up again to their visitor’s door, but silence reigned within.
“The old thing has gone to sleep,” murmured Mrs. Blight. “I can hear that odious Peters breathing. Perhaps the girl has slipped to her room so silently that we did not hear her.”