“Not that I have much ground for the idea, though,” he said to himself. “I wonder if Hebe can possibly enlighten me.”
They were approaching the end of dinner, and the rest of the conversation between himself and his hostess was on general subjects. But as she followed her guests to the drawing-room, she touched him gently on the arm.
“I shall expect you in a few minutes,” she said; and a quarter of an hour or so later, Sir Adam found himself following her up the first flight of the broad oak staircase, along a passage, the rooms of which, since her first coming there as a little child, had always been appropriated to Sir Conway’s ward.
“Poor dear child,” thought the old man to himself. “Things don’t seem so unequal, after all, in life. Stasy’s children have had more than Hebe, heiress though she is. She has never known what ‘home’ really is as they have done?”
But it was a very happy Hebe who rose from a low seat near the fireplace in her pretty boudoir, to greet him as he followed Lady Marth into the room.
“Now, I shall leave you alone,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve heaps to say to each other.”
They had more to talk of even than the lady of the house suspected. For long after Hebe had replied to all her old friend’s inquiries about herself—the result of the operation, and the still necessary precautions to be observed—and had told him the happy hopes for the future she now dared to entertain, they still went on talking earnestly and eagerly.
“I think our marriage will be early in the spring,” Hebe had said, and the allusion seemed to send Sir Adam’s thoughts in a further direction.
“Hebe,” he said, “I want to speak to you about my friends the Derwents, whom I am delighted to find you’ve got to know on your own account.”
The girl’s face lighted up with the keenest interest. “I too want to talk about them to you,” she said. “I have just been wondering if I may speak to you quite openly.”