Mr. Chewkle placed in her cold hand the letter he had received from Colonel Mires.
“That letter is from her,” he said; “she told me to give it to nobody but you, and I was to bring back your answer. Poor creature, she is distressed, she is!”
Flora had scarcely strength to tear open the letter. A terrible vision of something dreadful having happened, with which Hal was intimately connected, rose up before her, and it was not dissipated by finding the paper on which the communication was written was thickly bordered with black.
Her trembling eyes settled on the characters traced by a female hand. She read a few lines, uttered an agonized, suffocating cry, dropped the letter, staggered back a few steps, and fell into the ready arms of Colonel Mires lifeless.
“Fainted, by goles!” cried Mr. Chewkle.
“Quick, man, quick, assist me to bear her away from here,” cried the Colonel, in a state of excessive agitation—“quick, not an instant is to be lost.”
Mr. Chewkle complied, and together they bore her by a narrow avenue into a copse, and thence into a little country-lane, over which a canopy of trees arched from either side of the hedges that bordered it.
Near to a gap which had been purposely made in the hedge stood a close carriage, upon which was seated Colonel Mires’ Indian servant, and within it the man’s wife, an ayah, who had come over from India with a family at the same time Colonel Mires had returned to England.
Into this carriage Flora was placed, and Colonel Mires followed. There was a very brief conference between him and Mr. Chewkle—the rapid passing of a sum of money, and then, at a signal from Colonel Mires, who drew up the overlapping wooden blind, the carriage was driven swiftly away—a route through byways having been previously arranged; and Mr. Chewkle was left alone.
The commission agent looked at the money he had received with a smile, and then put it carefully away.