“Mamma,” exclaimed her daughter, suddenly, “I do not believe you fastened the door last night, and she came out when we were asleep!”
“How foolish you are,” was the impatient reply. “I am very sure that I shoved the bolt, and I do not believe it possible that she could have worked upon the door in any way to have slipped it back.”
However, to satisfy themselves, they went out, shut and bolted the door, and then tried, by gentle working it back and forth, to see if the bolt would slip.
No; it remained firm and tight, and the matter still continued to be a mystery, and a terribly tantalizing one, too.
They tried all the different doors leading from their own rooms into the corridors, but all were locked, excepting the one by which the servant who had brought the breakfast had entered, and Mrs. Coolidge had been obliged to rise to admit her, so that they knew it could not have been possible for Brownie to have escaped that way.
They knew well enough if Brownie had escaped and returned to her post, that the deepest shame and disgrace awaited them.
They little thought, however, during their anxious and almost ludicrous search in the cell, a pair of keen, bright eyes had been earnestly regarding them, while it must be confessed that Herbert Randal never enjoyed anything in his life so much as their anxiety and discomfiture regarding the beautiful maiden whom he had so opportunely aided.
The two disappointed plotters were, however, somewhat reassured, upon descending to the drawing-room, to find that Brownie’s disappearance was still the theme of conversation, together with the startling announcement which Adrian Dredmond had made.
Lady Randal looked anxious and annoyed, and was somewhat irritable.
Lady Ruxley was too ill to rise, being overcome with solicitude as to the fate of her companion, a fact which was received with the most cheerful resignation by most of the company, since it relieved them from the sting of her sharp tongue.