"Mother!—Richard and Miss Puttenham will be here to-night. They have heard of Hester."
In stupefaction they read the telegram, which had had been sent from
Crewe:
"Received news of Hester on arrival Paris yesterday. She has left M. Says she has gone to find your mother. Keep her. We arrive to-night Whinborough 7.10."
"It is now seven," said Catharine, looking at her watch. "But where—where is she?"
Hurriedly they called their little parlour-maid into the room and questioned her with closed doors. No—she knew nothing of any visitor. Nobody had called; nobody, so far as she knew, had passed by, except the ordinary neighbours. Once in the afternoon, indeed, she had thought she heard a carriage pass the bottom of the lane, but on looking out from the kitchen she had seen nothing of it.
Out of this slender fact, the only further information that could be extracted was a note of time. It was, the girl thought, about four o'clock when she heard the carriage pass.
"But it couldn't have passed," Catharine objected, "or you would have seen it go up the valley."
The girl assented, for the kitchen window commanded the road up to the bridge. Then the carriage, if she had really heard it, must have come to the foot of the lane, turned and gone back toward Whinborough again. There was no other road available.
The telegraph messenger was dismissed, after a cup of coffee; and thankful for something to do, Catharine and Mary, with minds full of conjecture and distress, set about preparing two rooms for their guests.
"Will they ever get here?" Mary murmured to herself, when at last the two rooms lay neat and ready, with a warm fire in each, and she could allow herself to open the front door again, an inch or two, and look out into the weather. Nothing to be seen but the whirling snow-flakes. The horrid fancy seized her that Hester had really been in that carriage and had turned back at their very door. So that again Richard, arriving weary and heart-stricken, would be disappointed. Mary's bitterness grew.