Eagerly, significantly, his eyes met hers.
Half fearfully, Aimée flashed an excited look around her. The space before the marriage throne had thinned, for there were no more arrivals waiting to offer their congratulations and the guests were clustering now about the tables for refreshment or drifting into the next salon where behind firmly stretched silken walls a stringed orchestra was playing.
Miss Jeffries alone was lingering near, but she moved off now—at a secret look from Ryder—with an appearance of unconcern.
"I am going to try my vernacular on the bride," Ryder had told her. "Don't linger or look alarmed. I won't give the show away."
So there was no one to overhear a low-toned colloquy between the bride and the veiled woman, no one to note or wonder that the veiled woman was speaking, strangely enough, in rapid English.
"When I didn't hear from you I had to come, to know if you received the package and letter I sent—"
With a swift gesture of her little ringed hand Aimée drew from the laces on her bosom that heavy gold locket.
"Indeed I have it—and the note, too, I found. But I could not write you. There was no way—no one to trust to mail it. And they had stolen my key," she whispered, and the confessing words with their quiver of forlornness told Ryder something of the story of those helpless days and nights.
He murmured, "I didn't dare write you more personally for fear they would find the note."
"I understood. That plaid about the box—that was so clever a warning. I kept the box and hunted in it."