“Love?” Betty could hardly articulate; her eyes were dark with passion. “Love, did you say? That is a will of hate,” and before any one could stop her she had flung open the folding doors and darted into the dining room.
CHAPTER XV
THREE BEEHIVES
Miriam looked at her watch—two o’clock. The brilliant sunlight and the out of doors exerted an appeal she could not resist. Stopping only long enough to put on her hat and coat, she started down the corridor and, when passing Mrs. Nash’s door, paused irresolutely. Mrs. Nash had recovered, when she left her at eight o’clock that morning, from her fright at discovering the disguised man in her room, but Miriam was troubled about her heart condition. She felt that she should speak to Somers before she went for her walk. She had told the maid to call her at any time if she needed assistance. If Mrs. Nash was asleep she could slip out without disturbing her.
Miriam softly turned the knob of the door and pushed it gently open, intending to beckon to Somers to come into the hall. She had opened it but a few inches when she heard Alexander Nash address his wife.
“I have just received a telegram from Canada, Dora,” he said, and added more quickly as his wife looked up, a question on her lips, “from Frank Chisholm telling me of the sudden death of Boris Zybinn.”
Mrs. Nash’s reply was unheard by Miriam. She leaned limply against the doorjamb, her strength stricken from her. Their voices sounded far distant—unreal. It was fully two minutes before her brain cleared and she had a realizing sense of what Nash was saying.
“A remarkable will,” he commented. “Alan receives practically nothing from his cousin, while Guy Trenholm is given twenty-five thousand dollars, a scarf-pin, and those wonderful old hunting prints. It is really extraordinary.”
Miriam waited to hear no more. Closing the door as softly as she had opened it, she stole back to her room, unlocked her bag, and drew from it the letter she had found in Mrs. Nash’s bedroom the night before. For a time she stood quite still, balancing the unopened letter in her hand; once she took up a hairpin, then laid it down, unused. Boris Zybinn! She shook her head and glanced about as if awakening from a nightmare.
A sound of voices coming through her open window caused her to look outside. Anna, her work done for the time being, was, as she expressed it to Martha later, “joshing” one of the constable’s assistants—a young deputy whose susceptible heart had made him a willing victim to her wiles. The deputy’s presence gave Miriam a sudden idea. Carefully placing the unopened letter in her hand bag, she went downstairs and hastened through the dining room, intending to go out of the door of the sunparlor and from there to the back of the house.
Martha—a rejuvenated Martha—looked up from changing the tablecloth at her approach, and Miriam, in spite of her absorption in her own affairs, noticed her changed appearance.