The tears fell from her eyes on his hands as she pressed them gratefully in hers. She did not say how well she was left off, for her heart was full; she only thanked him, and intimated that she had enough.
Mr. Arkell went away in a sort of perplexed dream. Could that suspicion of Benjamin Carr be a true one? He would be silent; but it was nearly certain to come out in some other way: murder generally does. From Mrs. Dundyke's he went straight up to Lady Dewsbury's, and found that she and Miss Arkell had again gone out of town. It was a disappointment; he had not seen Mildred for years and years.
Mrs. Carr came back to the room, and resumed her occupation after he had gone—that of searching amid the papers in the desk of the late Robert Carr the elder. It had proved to be his own desk that her husband had wanted her to bring over—but that is of no consequence. She was searching for a very simple thing—merely a receipt for a small sum of money which she had herself paid for Mr. Carr just before he died, and had returned the receipt to him; but it is often upon the merest trifles that the great events of life turn. The claim for this small sum she heard was sent in again, and she thought perhaps she might find the receipt in the desk, where Mr. Carr had sometimes used to place such papers. She did not find that, but she found something else.
Mrs. Dundyke was sitting by, between the other side of the table and the fire. She was talking about the Arkells—the kindly generosity of William, the selfishness and persistent ill-will of Charlotte.
"And the children?" asked Mrs. Carr, as she stood, opening paper after paper. "Do they follow their father or mother in their treatment of you?"
"Of the daughters I know little; I may say nothing. They have never noticed me, even by a message. But the son—ah! you should know Travice Arkell! I cannot tell you how I love him. Will you believe that Charlotte——What is the matter?"
Emma Carr had come upon a sealed letter in an old blotting-book. The superscription was in the handwriting of her father-in-law, and ran as follows:—"To my son Robert. Not to be opened until after the death of my father, Marmaduke Carr."
She uttered the exclamation which had attracted the attention of Mrs. Dundyke, and sat down on her chair. With a prevision that this letter had something to do with the question of the marriage, she tore the letter open and sat gazing on it spellbound.
"Have you found the receipt, my dear?"
Not the receipt. With her cheeks flushing, her pulses quickening, her hands trembling, she laid the letter open before Mrs. Dundyke. "Robert was right; Robert was right! Oh! if he had but lived to read this! How could he have overlooked this, when he examined the desk after his father's death? It must have slipped between the leaves of the blotting-book, and been hidden there."