"I am so sorry, Rupert," Cicely said gently, answering the look on his face rather than his actual speech. "Is there nothing anybody can do for you?"
"You dear and kind little person," he answered. "No, there is nothing. Mrs. Stanforth is my friend, the best friend man ever had, and if, just now, she finds it best that there should be silence between us, I am ready to accept her decision. Only silence is—the very devil," he ended, with again a rueful laugh.
*****
That telegram to Sir Arthur Congreve would have been despatched on the previous day, but for Margaret's sudden and startling collapse during her conversation with Christina. The girl's mention of the pendant which she asserted had been given her by her mother; and, the sight of the pendant itself, had produced in the elder woman a terrible excitement, which had ended in her sinking back amongst her pillows in a dead faint. The words she had spoken before she became unconscious, had seemed to Christina like the incoherent ramblings of a delirious person, and in the alarm caused by Margaret's unconsciousness, she had set them aside, and to all intents and purposes forgotten them. Indeed, so little importance had she attached to them, that when Dr. Fergusson came to see his patient, Christina only accounted for Margaret's sudden collapse, by the long and interesting conversation in which they had been engaged, and she added in accents of self-reproach—
"I think I ought not to have come here at all, and certainly I ought not to have shown her how upset and frightened I was."
"Your coming, and even the telling of your story, ought not to be enough to account for Mrs. Stanforth's collapsing in this way," the doctor answered, a puzzled look in his eyes. "She is such a singularly sane, well-balanced woman, that one feels there must have been something quite unusual to account for her fainting so suddenly. As far as you know, she had no shock?"
"No; none," Christina replied. "I mean, I know of no shock. I was just sitting by her bed, telling her about Sir Arthur and his accusation, and she was very much interested, and asked if I had the pendant with me. And directly she saw it, she got quite white, and she said something I could not understand, about the initials over the emerald; and then, all at once, she dropped back and was unconscious in a few seconds."
Fergusson looked keenly at the speaker.
"Mrs. Stanforth had never seen this pendant before?"
"No; never," it was Christina's turn to look puzzled. "I had never seen her until the day she came out to the gate to ask me to fetch a doctor. To all intents and purposes she and I are strangers."