“Certainly not,” said Coralie. “I have not seen Verena since she went out, sixteen months ago. Neither have I heard from her lately. What is it that you mean, George?”
George Bazalgette stood back against the book-case, and told us what he meant. Some weeks ago—nay, months—upon returning to Magnolia Range after a week’s absence at his other estate across the country, he found Verena flown. She left a note for him, saying she did not get on well with Magnolia, and was going to stay a little while with Mrs. Dickson. He felt hurt that Verena had not spoken openly to him about Magnolia, but glad that she should have the change, as she had not been well of late. Mrs. Dickson was his aunt and lived in a particularly healthy part of one of the adjoining islands. Time passed on; he wrote to Verena, but received no answer to his letters, and he concluded she was so put out with Magnolia that she would not write. By-and-by he thought it was time to see after her, and journeyed to Mrs. Dickson’s. Mrs. Dickson was absent, gone to stay with some friends at St. Thomas, and the servants did not know when she would return. He supposed, as a matter of course, that she had taken Verena with her, and went back home. Still the time passed; no news of Verena, no letters, and he proceeded again to Mrs. Dickson’s. Then, to his unbounded astonishment, he found that Verena had only stayed with her one week, and had taken the mail-packet for Southampton on her way to stay with her sister at Oxlip Grange. Giving a blessing to Mrs. Dickson for not having written to inform him of all this, and for having kept his letters to Verena by that young lady’s arbitrary command, he came off at once to England.
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Coralie. “She did not come here.”
The fine colour on George Bazalgette’s face, which retained its freshness though he did live in a hot climate, lost its brightness.
“She would be the least likely to come here, of all places,” pursued Coralie. “In the last answer I ever sent her, after a letter of complaints to me, hinting that she thought of coming here for a time, I scolded her sharply and assured her I should despatch her back to you the next day.”
“What am I to do?” he exclaimed. “Where look for her?”
Not caring to intrude longer, we took our departure, the Squire shaking his head dubiously over Mrs. George Bazalgette’s vagaries. “It was the same thing,” he said, “when she was Verena Fontaine, as you remember, Johnny, and what a good fellow her husband seems to be.—Halloa! Why, that’s Cole again!”
He was coming out of North Villa. “You are back soon!” he cried. And we told him of the arrival of George Bazalgette.
Cole seemed to stare with all his eyes as he listened. I could see them in the starlight. “What will he do if he can’t find her here?” he asked of me. “Do you know, Johnny Ludlow?”