"Miss Jones? Miss Alora Jones?" questioned the woman in a soft voice.
"Yes; what is it?"
"I've a message for you. May I come in?"
Alora, fearful that Mary Louise or the Colonel might have been taken suddenly ill, threw wide the door and allowed the woman to enter. As the nurse closed the door behind her Alora switched on the electric light and then, facing her visitor, for the first time recognized her and gave a little cry of surprise.
"Janet!"
"Yes; I am Janet Orme, your mother's nurse."
"But I thought you abandoned nursing after you made my father give you all that money," an accent of scorn in her tone.
"I did, for a time," was the quiet answer. "'All that money' was not a great sum; it was not as much as your father owed me, so I soon took up my old profession again."
The woman's voice and attitude were meek and deprecating, yet Alora's face expressed distrust. She remembered Janet's jaunty insolence at her father's studio and how she had dressed, extravagantly and attended theatre parties and fashionable restaurants, scattering recklessly the money she had exacted from Jason Jones. Janet, with an upward sweep of her half veiled eyes, read the girl's face clearly, but she continued in the same subdued tones:
"However, it is not of myself I came here to speak, but on behalf of your mother's old friend, Doctor Anstruther."