Now that Lady Perivale's action had ceased to be a nine days' wonder, and the lady herself was a happy wife, travelling by easy stages towards the land of ancient monuments and modern amusements, pyramids and golf links, Sphinxes and croquet, colossal sepulchres of unknown Pharaohs, and monster hotels with unknown tariffs; now that he had accomplished his task and had been handsomely rewarded, it might seem that John Faunce's interest in Grace Perivale's double would cease and determine. Strange to say that interest grew rather than diminished, and he contrived to see his little friend, the lodging-house slavey, once or twice a week, and so to be informed of all Mrs. Randall's proceedings; indeed, his love of detail led him to ask Betsy for an old blotting-book of the first-floor lodger's, which had been flung upon the dustheap, and which the girl had retrieved from that foul receptacle for the sake of its picture cover.
"Most people collect something," he told Betsy; "my fancy is old blotting-paper."
"Well, I never did!" exclaimed the damsel. "I know many as collecks postage-stamps, but I never heerd as blotting-paper was valuable!"
"It is, Betsy—sometimes," in token of which Mr. Faunce gave her a crown piece for the ragged book, with its inky impress of Mrs. Randall's sprawling penmanship.
Faunce had paid his witness the balance of the promised reward, £120, in bank-notes, the evening after the trial, and he was prepared to hear she had taken wing.
Surely with a sum of money in hand she would leave that dismal street, and hurry away to some more attractive locality. To Paris, perhaps, to buy fine clothes, and flaunt her recovered beauty in the Bois; or to Monte Carlo, to try her luck at the tables. It was in the character of such a woman to squander her last hundred pounds as freely as if she had an unlimited capital behind it.
She had talked of leaving her lodgings, the little handmaiden Betsy told him, but it hadn't come off. She had given a week's notice, and then had cut up rough when the missus took a lady and gentleman to look at the rooms. She wasn't going to be chucked out like a stray dog, she'd go when she wanted, and not before.
"I don't believe she'll never go," Betsy said, with a wise air. "She ain't got it in her to make up her mind about nothink. She sits in the easy-chair all day, smokin' cigarettes and readin' a novel, or lays on the sofa, and seems only half awake. And of a evening she gets dreadful low. She says she hates the house, and won't sleep another night in it, and yet when morning comes she don't offer to go. And then, she's that under his thumb that if he say she's not to leave, go she won't."
"You mean the dark gentleman?" said Faunce.
"Of course I do. There ain't any other as I knows on."