“I don’t,” said Rose rather decidedly. “If we really owe so much to Belgium that we have gone to war for her sake, then it seems to me we ought to send soldiers to help her.”
“But then we have such a small army,” objected Mrs. Otway.
“It may grow bigger,” observed her daughter quietly, “especially if people like Jervis Blake think of enlisting.”
“But it wasn’t Jervis Blake, darling child—it was Miss Forsyth who said that to me.”
“So it was! How stupid I am!” Rose turned a little pink. She did not wish to deceive her mother. But Mrs. Otway was so confiding, so sure that every one was as honourable as herself, that she could not always be trusted to keep secrets.
CHAPTER VI
Mr. and Mrs. Hegner stood together in their brilliantly lighted but now empty front shop. In a few minutes their guests would begin to arrive. Mrs. Hegner looked tired, and rather cross, for the shop had not been transformed into its present state without a good deal of hard work on the part of all of them, her husband, their German assistants, and herself—their English shopman had been told that to-night his services would not be required. But Mrs. Hegner, though her pretty face was tired and peevish-looking, yet looked far pleasanter than she had done half an hour ago, for her husband had just presented her with a long gold chain.
In a very, very quiet way, quite under the rose, so to speak, Mr. Hegner sometimes went in for small money-lending transactions. He would give loans on jewellery, and even on “curios” and good furniture; always, however, in connection with an account which had, maybe, run a little too long—never as a separate transaction. The old-fashioned chain of 18-carat gold, which he had just hung with a joking word round his pretty wife’s slender neck, had been the outcome of one of these minor activities.
It was now a quarter to nine; and suddenly there came the sound of loud, rather impatient knocking on the locked and barred front door of the shop. A frown gathered over Mr. Hegner’s face; it transformed his good-looking, generally genial, countenance into something which was, for the moment, very disagreeable.
“What can that be?” he said to his wife. “Did you not put plainly on every card ‘Entrance by Market Row,’ Polly?”