“Benson must have picked up the wrong card,” thought Rufus. “Or Lally might have given a wrong card. Why should she give her employer’s card, unless indeed she was buying a picture for her employer? I’ll go back and see Benson.”
He went back, but the picture dealer affirmed that Lally had given him the card with Miss Wroat’s name upon it, and Rufus said to himself:
“I have it. Miss Wroat is the sour-looking, servant-like woman in black, some parvenue grown suddenly rich, and Lally is her companion. This Miss Wroat knows Lally’s story and despises me. I’ll go back to Mount street this evening, and see Miss Wroat. When I tell her the whole truth she will pity me, and allow me to see Lally, I am sure. I won’t care for poverty or toil if I can have back my poor little wife. I will fly with her to some foreign country before my father comes back. But what did Lally mean by my ‘marriage with an heiress?’ My father must have told her of Neva. Why, I’d rather have my poor little Lally than a thousand haughty Nevas, with a thousand Hawkhursts at their backs.”
Early in the evening Rufus returned to Mount street, and Buttons again answered his double knock.
“Family gone away, sir,” said the lad, recognizing the visitor.
“Where have they gone?” inquired Rufus in sudden despair.
Buttons declined to answer, and was about to close the door, when Rufus placed his knee against it and cried out:
“Boy, I must see Miss Wroat, or her young companion. If they have gone away, I must follow them. My business with them is imperative. Tell me truthfully where they have gone, and I will give you this.”
He held up as he spoke a glittering half sovereign.
Buttons hesitated. Clearly he had had his instructions to betray to no one the course his young mistress had taken, and just as clearly his virtue wavered before the glittering bribe offered to him. He reasoned within himself that no one need ever know that he had told, and here was an opportunity to make ten shillings without work. He yielded to the temptation.