“Good luck!” he exclaimed. “And remember that in this country we are taught to believe that no innocent man is ever wrongly convicted.”
A queer, mocking smile came over his face, and then once more he began to cough, and again she waited, till the painful sounds ceased.
After giving Mrs. Lightfoot a cup of tea, she wrote a note of what she felt to be lame apology, and, leaving it on the kitchen table, crept out and went to the nearest post office.
The young woman who accepted the strangely worded telegram for transmission looked very hard at Jean Bower:
“This a practical joke, or what?” she asked suspiciously.
Jean answered soberly: “No, it’s not a joke. It’s exactly what it pretends to be—an offer of marriage from a dying man.”
“Some girls seem to have all the luck! Forty-one words.”
Jean was so tired that she slept away the journey which would otherwise have been so full of disappointed, bitter thoughts, and she felt as if she had been away months instead of days when she came out into the big station yard of Grendon, and saw her Uncle Jock’s familiar two-seater with him at the wheel waiting for her. He had not come on to the platform to greet her, and for that she was grateful, for she was shrinkingly aware that there were prying eyes and listening ears everywhere—everywhere, that is, where she was recognized as the heroine of “The Terriford Mystery.”
Dr. Maclean said very little while he drove his niece to Bonnie Doon. It was not till after she had taken off her things and come downstairs, feeling so strange, so little at home there, that it seemed almost impossible to believe she had been so short a time away, that her aunt suddenly asked: “I suppose Kentworthy has told you about Miss Prince?”
Jean answered slowly: “I’ve seen Sir Harold Anstey, and he told me.”