"Yes," said Selby, "that is the place."
"Well, then--but surely it cannot be!--that is the house Bruneau lives in--the Stanleys' man. His wife confessed to me and Aunt Judy, only last winter, that she found a baby at her door one summer night, many years ago, and carried it up to the door of the big house, where my cousins took it in and adopted it. But, from the way she spoke of Muriel's parentage, it can be no relation of yours, dear Mrs. Selby. She said it was--but I can't say what she said."
"If you please, miss," cried the sergeant, who had been listening, "will you be so kind as to walk back with us. As you know the woman, she will speak different to you from what she did to us. I feel noways sure that she was not lying when I questioned her, now you put the notion in my head."
Again there came knocking to Annette's door. Again she opened it, and looked as if she fain would have run away at sight of the policeman before her.
"Annette," said Betsey, "did you not tell me that you carried that baby you found on your stoop up to Miss Stanley's door and left it?"
"I know it," answered Annette, and covering her face with her apron, fled back into the interior of her house. They could hear her mount the little stair, and bang to a door, but they saw her no more. In truth, from the time she had unburdened her feelings to the rector's lady, a new misgiving oppressed her mind. Could English women be trusted to keep a promise, and they heretics? What would the Miss Stanleys say, first of her conduct towards themselves in foisting that particular child on them, and next in divulging the story, to the discredit of their adopted niece? And now the story was out, and there was a minister of the law come to take her.
CHAPTER XVII.
[AT LAST].
Miss Stanley sat in the dining-room making up her accounts. She sat at a table by the window, with her bills and account books spread in order before her, and her pen in her hand, waiting to begin--waiting till the wandering thoughts would come back from their wool-gathering, and settle down to work. Once and again she advanced so far as to dip her pen in the ink, but the figures did not come, the page before her continued white, the ink dried up in her pen. With her elbow on the table, her cheek upon her hand, she went on thinking--thinking about her household, though not about her accounts. She had been head of the family so long, had steered and directed it so many years, and they had been so happy together; and now, it made her head whirl to think of the changes that were coming to pass. In the drawing-room, at that moment, was Muriel with her Gerald--a pair of children, and as unthinkingly happy. Their clear laughter penetrated through closed doors, and she heard it where she sat. Matilda was in the morning-room with Considine, as utterly content, if less obstreperously merry than her niece. And Penelope sat alone.
The moisture gathered in her eyes as she thought, but promptly was brushed away as a disloyalty, for if "dear Tilly" had come to love another more, she was very sure she continued to love her aging sister none the less. And yet it did seem hard to see that other come in between. Since her sister had been a very little girl, she had been to her a mother, watching over and caring for her till they grew to be companions and friends. They had been all the world to one another, and while, with a mother's inconsistency, she had wondered at the blindness of the men, who did not come and marry her sister, she knew that if they had, she would have hated them for their success. And now, after all danger seemed over, when they had settled down to grow old together, when even their adopted daughter was old enough to marry the man, the devastating man, had come--broken in, to disturb the repose of their virginal paradise in the hour of coming twilight, and end the pensive sweetness of their lives.