"Well, Mrs. Randall, expect to hear from me soon. Good-bye."
Faunce left her, pleased with his success. Everything was now easy. There was nothing wanted but the audacious libel, which should afford ground for an action; and that, as Mr. Faunce told Lady Perivale, would be forthcoming.
He was satisfied, but he was also thoughtful. There had been something unaccountable in the woman's manner: that strange mixture of anger and apprehension, the sick, white look that came over her face when she spoke of Rannock. Something evil there was assuredly—some hidden thing in her mind which made that name a sound of fear.
He had studied the woman intently during the quarter of an hour's tête-à-tête, and he did not think that she was a bad woman, from the criminal point of view. He did not think she was treacherous or cruel. If any evil thing had befallen Rannock, the evil was not her doing. And, after all, her agitation might be only that of a woman of shattered nerves and quick feelings, who had loved intensely and been badly treated—cast off and left in poverty—by the man she loved. It might be that the perturbed look which he had taken for fear was not fear, but resentment.
He telegraphed to Lady Perivale, asking for an appointment, and presented himself at Runnymede Grange on the following afternoon. He had not seen his client since their first interview, and he was astonished at the change in her countenance and manner. On the former occasion she had been all gloom: to-day she was all brightness. The nervous irritability, the fiery indignation were gone. She treated the subject of her wrongs in a business-like tone, almost as a bagatelle.
"Something has happened since I saw her. Something that has changed the whole tenor of her life," thought Faunce.
He had a shrewd idea of what that "something" was a few minutes later, when Lady Perivale told him that she would like a friend, in whose judgment she had confidence, to hear his report; and when Arthur Haldane came into the room—
"This is Mr. Faunce," said Grace, in a tone that showed her friend had been told all about him; and the two men saluted each other politely, without any hint of their former meeting.
Faunce told Lady Perivale that he had found the woman who resembled her, and that her evidence would be ready when it was required.
"She will not shrink from standing up in court and acknowledging that she was with Colonel Rannock in Algiers?" asked Lady Perivale, wonderingly.