“But how do you know that?” she demanded, and another wave of surprise flooded her face with color.
“Mrs. Laing and I watched you for quite a time—the watchin’ was involuntary on my part, but she wouldn’t come away from the veranda, an’ now I know why. You will observe, Miss Dane, that I have bin the goat all through the proceedin’s.”
“I can hardly say that.”
“No, you wouldn’t. But it’s true. The only bit of luck I’ve had is that I am saved the painful necessity of bein’ refused as a husband by Mrs. Laing. I came here to ask her to marry me.”
“Oh, I am so sorry——” began Evelyn, but Fairholme’s cackling laugh checked her.
“Why sorry? You’ve done me a good turn, twice over, an’ if I can do you one, just ask. In the first place, she would probably have said ‘No,’ and in the second, where should I have been if she said ‘Yes.’ In the soup, eh, what?”
Lord Fairholme seemed to pride himself on his narrow escape, and gave Evelyn the credit of rescuing him. She protested that if she had known he was really bent on marrying Mrs. Laing she would neither have attacked the latter in his presence nor called on him to bear out her statements. But he refused to admit that she had conferred other than a favor on him, and repeated his desire to serve her if the opportunity offered. It came quickly.
That night, when Evelyn was sound asleep, her room was entered and Warden’s letter taken. It lay with the ring and some other trinkets on a dressing–table. The door was locked and bolted, but the window was wide open to admit the sea breeze, and, although the room was on the third floor, and therefore some forty feet or more above the ground level, it was impossible that the thief could have entered it except through the window. That the letter alone was the objective was shown by the fact that the exceedingly valuable ring was left untouched. There was almost a hint of malicious humor in the discrimination exercised. An ordinary criminal, though bribed to procure a document of great importance to some other person, would certainly have made away with any jewelry that was lying handy. In this instance, there seemed to be an unspoken warning to the girl that she was powerless in the toils that surrounded her.
At first, she suspected Rosamund of complicity in this new theft, but when she asked herself who had most to gain from the perusal of the letter, suspicion pointed, not to Rosamund, who could guess its contents with fair accuracy, but to Baumgartner and his associates, who were evidently more afraid of one man than of the armed might of Britain.