“No, neither of us,” Margery answered promptly. “I saw him once when Queenie and I were riding in the Bois, and she made him come and speak to me, but I did not like him much. He impressed me as one very proud and haughty, who only endured me for Queenie’s sake. He was fine-looking, though, and his manners were very elegant. Did you know him, Mr. Beresford?”
“Scarcely at all, as I was a mere boy when he went away, but I have heard much of him from the villagers; he was not very popular, I imagine,” Mr. Beresford replied, and then the conversation drifted into other channels, and they talked of Phil and Anna, and her engagement with the major, which was generally understood, but nothing more was said of Margery’s early life.
Mr. Beresford had not succeeded in reading the page just as he had expected to read it, and was a good deal puzzled and perplexed when, at rather a late hour, he said good-night to Margery, and went back to his rooms at the hotel, with his mind full of what she had told him of her life as connected with Reinette Hetherton, and full too with thoughts of herself, and after he had retired to his bed, and a feeling of drowsiness began to steal over him, there came to him another face than Queenie’s—a fairer face, with golden hair and eyes of blue—and in his troubled dreams the face hid Queenie’s from him, and a voice with more of a foreign accent than Queenie’s was sounding in his ears.
It was very late when he awoke, with a confused vision of black eyes and blue eyes dancing before him, and hastily dressing himself and swallowing his breakfast, he started for his office, where to his surprise he found Reinette Hetherton waiting for him.
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE INTERVIEW.
Reinette had thought and thought till her head seemed bursting with the effort to solve the mystery of her nurse’s silence. Had she done anything that she was ashamed to tell, and if so what was it, and did it concern any one but herself?
“No, I will not believe it,” she said more than once, with a striking out of her hand as if thrusting something aside. “I will not believe it. There is some good reason for her conduct which she can give me, and I am going to her to know the truth, but the world will not be as charitable as I and will say bad things of her, no doubt. So to the world she must remain Mrs. La Rue, and nobody will ever know that she is Christine, except Mr. Beresford, who, of course, knows it now, for Louis Arnaud has written to him, no doubt. But I can trust him, and I shall ask him to keep the knowledge to himself.”
After this decision Reinette grew calmer; the violent throbbing in her temples ceased, and she slept comparatively well that night. But though the morning found her stronger and better, she felt nervous and unstrung, and shrunk with a great dread from confronting Mrs. La Rue and wringing her secret from her, if secret there were to wring.
“I am so hurt and disappointed,” she thought, as she dressed herself for her calls. “I have loved Christine so much, and wanted so to find her, and now she is this woman whom, for some unaccountable reason, I never liked, though she is Margery’s mother and greatly superior to her class. There surely is something wrong and I am going to find it out.”