“No, thank you,” Mrs. Alexander answered, with a great effort. “It is not far—we shall soon be there—good-night!”
The young man would gladly have gone, but her tone was decisive, and he turned back into the mansion, as the carriage drove away, greatly puzzled by her strange manner, and at the way she had spoken of his guardian.
Mrs. Alexander scarcely spoke all the way home, and insisted upon going directly to her room alone, although Virgie begged to be allowed to do something for her—to stay with her during the night.
“All that I need is rest and quiet,” she said. “Good-night my darling!”
She kissed her tenderly, wondering, with a terrible heart-pang, how she could ever tell her that her lover’s guardian was her own father—the man who had so cruelly wronged his wife and child more than eighteen years ago.
Once in the room, without even stopping to remove her wraps, she went to her writing-desk, drew forth a package from a drawer in it, and took it to the light for examination.
It was the mysterious package which her uncle, Mark Alexander, had confided to her on his death-bed, charging her to return it to the owner should she ever discover who that person was.
She had discovered that night to whom it belonged.
She held the seal close to the candle, and gazed upon it with darkening eyes and sternly compressed lips. It was stamped with a shield bearing a patriarchal cross, and under it was the motto, “Droit et Loyal.”
“How strange!” she murmured. “It belongs to his sister—to that woman who mocked and scorned me; whom I saved from a dreadful death, and nursed through a critical illness! She must have been one of those women whom Uncle Mark heard conversing together that day in the hotel parlor here in London. How wonderful that anything belonging to her should have fallen into my hands! How wonderful everything is—Virgie’s betrothal to Rupert—her meeting with him to-night! How will it all end? To think that he was there, in the same house with me, this evening! I am really curious to know what this contains,” she continued, turning the package over and over, and regarding it with troubled eyes, while her thoughts were busy with the past.