“If you are better to-morrow, shall I go to town and see Mr. Hunter?” she asked, “or should you like me to send for my uncle?”
“I should like you to do both,” he answered; and accordingly the next day Phemie started for London, and proceeded from the Eastern Counties Railway Station, where Duncan met her, to the offices of Messrs. Hunter, Marks, Son, and Co., Leadenhall Street.
“You will come and stay with us?” Duncan said. The “us” referring to himself and his sister Helen, who was his housekeeper; but Phemie refused.
“I must return to Marshlands as soon as possible,” she said. “I feel wretched about being away at all, only it was a comfort to Captain Stondon for me to come up and learn what Mr. Hunter had to tell us. They have got his boxes, Duncan.”
“Then he did sail?”
“I am going to hear all about it—all they can tell me.” And she looked out at the block there always is at the point where Cornhill and Gracechurch and Leadenhall Streets join, in order to hide her face from Duncan.
The punishment was not over; it was now but the beginning of the end.
Mr. Hunter received her in a large office on the first floor, which was well, not to say luxuriously, furnished. There were comfortable chairs, there was a library-table in the centre of the room, the floor was covered with a turkey carpet, the blinds were drawn down over plate-glass windows. The only articles out of keeping with the generally stylish appearance of the apartment were three large boxes, one of which had been opened, and to which Mr. Hunter directed Mrs. Stondon’s attention.
“We advertised those boxes for months, and at last opened one of them. It is so unusual a thing for passengers’ luggage not to be labelled, that when Captain Stondon applied to us for information we never thought of associating that luggage with his missing relative. But the papers we have discovered leave no doubt as to the gentleman’s identity; and one of the sailors, who was laid up from the effects of an accident when the Singapore was ready for starting, has since called here and given us full particulars on the subject of his fate. He says he remembers a gentleman being carried down to the Lahore the very morning she sailed. He looked in a dying state when brought on board, and before a week had passed all was over. He was buried the next day.”
“Where?” Phemie interrupted—then—