As he lit a cigarette, his hand shook a little, but the more he thought of it, the more he told himself that for all that had occurred with relation to himself to-night there was an absolutely natural explanation.
Take the second figure Bubbles had described? It was obviously that of the woman on whom he had allowed his mind to dwell uneasily, intensely, this afternoon. She was his only enemy—if you could call the crazy creature who had been poor Milly's companion an enemy.
The odious personality of the absurdly named Julia Pigchalke was still very present to him as he turned and joined his men guests in the beautiful camber-roofed and linen-panelled room known as the hall. She was the one fly, albeit a very small fly, in the ointment of his deep content.
CHAPTER V
It was a good deal more than an hour later—in fact nearer twelve than eleven o'clock—when young Donnington got up from the comfortable chair where he had been ensconced, and put down the book which he had been reading.
All the other men of the party, with the exception of old Mr. Burnaby—who had gone to bed for good after his dramatic bolt from the drawing-room—had disappeared some time ago. But Donnington had stayed on downstairs, absorbed in a curious, privately printed book containing the history of Wyndfell Hall.
Suddenly his eyes fell on the following passage:
"Every piece of the furniture in 'the White Parlour,' as it is still called, is of historic value and interest. To take but one example. A low, high-backed chair, covered with petit point embroidery, is believed to have been the prie-dieu on which the Princesse de Lamballe knelt during the whole of the night preceding her terrible death. In a document which was sold with the chair in 1830, her servant—who, it appears, had smuggled the chair into the prison—recounts the curious fact that the poor Princess had a prevision that she was to be torn in pieces. She spent the last night praying for strength to bear the awful ordeal she knew lay before her."