“It will, indeed! I don’t feel indifferent to fortune any longer now that it has brought us together. When the Will was read aloud yesterday, I did not know whether I was standing on my head or my heels. I rushed down to the vicarage, and good little Mrs Thornton cried upon my neck, literally she did, Mollie!”
Mollie smiled at him with love-lit eyes.
“But oh, Jack, there’s something else—Victor? What about him? Was he terribly disappointed? Did he get nothing?”
“No! not a cent!”
“Did Uncle Bernard leave no word of explanation or good-bye?”
“There was no note, but there was an envelope and an—an enclosure,” said Jack gravely.
He put his hand in his waistcoat-pocket and drew from his pocket-book an unmounted photograph.
“Druce opened this in the library after the Will was read, stared at it for a moment, then threw it in the fire, and dashed out of the room. It fell on the grate and the lawyer picked it up and gave it to me.”
He held out the photograph as he spoke, and Mollie bent eagerly over it. It was Ruth’s missing picture of the library at the Court—one of the longtime exposures which she had taken on the eventful morning when the desk had been opened in the squire’s absence. The nearer part of the interior was clear and distinct, but the further half was blurred as if something had moved while the plate was still exposed, while leaning over the open desk was a man’s figure, dim and blurred indeed, but recognisable in a flash as that of Victor Druce!
Mollie’s face was white to the lips as she raised it to meet Jack’s glance, and he put his arm round her protectingly.