But she must go out again; she must discover how quickly she could sail:—perhaps she was missing an opportunity.
The girl who had talked to her in the morning came in and brushed against her as she passed in the dim hall.
"Oh, it's you!" she said, stopping. "How dark it is in the passage! I wish they'd light the gas. How did you get on? I found something else of yours up there. It didn't look worth much, but it's no good leaving things about, and there isn't a key in your chest of drawers."
As she spoke she held out something.
"They've been talking about you," she went on, "saying things about you turning up at night without a bag or anything. They can't understand you calling yourself Miss and wearing a wedding ring. I told them it would be worse if you called yourself Mrs. and didn't.—You'll have to get some things, won't you?"
She looked inquisitively at Susan, who had sunk on to the hard wooden chair in the hall, unable to face the stairs. But the mysterious stranger was hardly attending to what she said, amounting as it did to a declaration that she had found a supporter. Lady Henrietta's unlucky brooch, that she had inadvertently taken with her, was just then a precious thing. She remembered how Barnaby had laughed at his mother, while she persisted in telling its history, and how she had vainly tried once or twice to throw it away, but had given up.
"I know it's bewitched," she had said.
"It is always bringing me small misfortunes, but I have an uncanny feeling that I mustn't part with it. Besides, I can't. It has fallen in the fire, and been left in a railway carriage, and had all kinds of mischances, but it has always come back to me. It's attached to me for ever and ever. I don't know what would break the spell."
Susan smiled a little as she gazed at that bit of dinted silver. Fate had made an end of the superstition. Surely she might keep it, valueless in itself, for the sake of the woman she would never see again. Its unluckiness did not matter....
"Yes," she said vaguely. "I must go and get some things."