“Oh! I am glad to see you safely back again, Miss,” she said. “It is going on for ten o’clock, and I have been so anxious about you ever since it became dark. Mr. Felix Gray has been here. He arrived about nine o’clock, but when he found you were out he did not stay.”
I stood still in the hall, and a deadly sick feeling came over me. “Did he ask where I was?” I managed to say.
“Yes, Miss. Oh, please don’t look like that,” replied Anne, almost weeping. “I hope you’ll forgive me, but he was so stern and asked such sharp questions I was obliged to tell him.”
“You told him——?”
“I told him that you had said you were going to spend the day with an old schoolfellow who was staying near here.”
“And then?”
“Oh, dear! Miss, I am more vexed than I can say that it should have happened, for he looked in a dreadful way and went straight out at the door. I begged him to wait, but he said there would be no use in waiting. Then he changed his mind and came in again, and said he’d leave a note for you. I got him pen and paper and he wrote a short note. ‘Give her this,’ he said, ‘when she returns, if she ever does return.’ Then he went away. He has not been gone half an hour, Miss, if you’d only been a little bit earlier you’d have caught him. My dear, how wet you are, and how white you look; what does it all mean?”
“Where is the note?” I gasped.
She went into the dining-room and brought it out to me. I tore it open. There were but two words written on the paper:
“Good-bye, Rosamund.”