He gave her a few minutes in which to recover herself and then saw her back to her aunt’s house, after which he strolled slowly back to the club. On the way he pondered over Sybil Kean’s words to the girl at Staveley. He could not reconcile them with her evident anxiety when she spoke to him about Leslie. No doubt she had seen that Cynthia was near to the breaking-point and had lied nobly in the hope of reassuring her. And yet that wasn’t like Sybil, as he knew her.
She was the last person to kindle a false hope deliberately.
His mind was still dwelling on her as he picked up the little pile of letters that awaited him at the club and it was with a shock that he recognized her handwriting on one of them. He opened it eagerly. Inside was a closed envelope, unaddressed, with a covering letter from Sybil herself which ran:
“Hatter dear, the flowers were lovely. It was like you to think of them. In a day or two I shall have got rid of the doctor and be able to thank you in person, instead of in this silly note which looks so much more shaky than I really am. I am picking up wonderfully, but it was a close shave this time, Hatter, and it has made me think. Don’t tell Edward, but I have a strong feeling that the next attack will be my last. I want you to do me a favour and put the enclosed among your most private papers. If I should die before John Leslie’s trial is over and if he should be convicted I want you to open it and read it and then show it to Edward. If John Leslie is acquitted or if I am alive at the close of the trial I am trusting you to burn it unread. I expect you think I am mad, and sometimes, lately, I have wondered whether my brain is not going, but you are the only friend I have whose loyalty I know I can utterly depend on. I know I can trust you and that you will do what I ask unquestioningly. Good-by, my dear, till we meet. They won’t let me write any more. Sybil.”
Fayre stood staring blankly at the letter and the enclosure; then he crossed to a writing-table and wrote in his small, neat hand across the envelope: “In the event of my death, to be destroyed unread.”
This done, he put it carefully away in his pocket-book with the snapshot Miss Allen had given him.
“She knows,” he told himself heavily. “And she has kept the truth from Edward. No wonder the strain of it has almost killed her!”
Chapter XXI
Sybil Kean’s amazing letter left Fayre in a condition of mingled bewilderment and relief. Out of all the tangle of events that he had been trying in vain to unravel one strand at least had inexplicably straightened itself. Lady Kean was not only already in possession of the information he had stumbled on so unexpectedly, information which he had hoped against hope might possibly be kept from her, but she had deliberately withheld it from her husband. That the truth was contained in the letter which she had asked him only to open in the event of her death he had no doubt, and that she was relying on him to break the news as mercifully as possible to Kean was equally evident. Little difference it would make to Edward, Fayre reflected grimly, once he had lost the one being in whom his whole life was centred.
His last action that night was to switch on the light over his bed and read her letter again for the tenth time, amazed at the strength and devotion of the woman he had thought he knew so well, but whom he had after all understood so little. He realized how greatly he had underestimated her affection for Kean and how misled he had been in concluding that her heart was irretrievably buried in her first husband’s grave, and he wondered by what feminine logic she had managed to reconcile her conscience with the deception she had practised on Kean. The one thing that puzzled him in her letter was her stipulation that he should not read the enclosure in the event of Leslie’s acquittal. Try as he would, he could see no connection between the trial and the information he believed the enclosure to contain. One thing was obvious: at the earliest opportunity he must see Sybil Kean and tell her that he had surprised her secret. That she was, literally, worrying herself into the grave he had no doubt.