"Prue, you sly minx, I have come to give you the scolding you deserve," she began, and half-mirthful, half-reproachful, was about to embrace her when her glance fell upon Lord Beachcombe. She started back and turned her eyes from one to the other with exaggerated disapproval, behind which lurked the excitement of the keen hunter on a promising trail.
Beachcombe's dark face flushed with an embarrassment that he vainly attempted to conceal under the elaborate politeness of his greeting, but Prue, all innocent smiles, and thoroughly enjoying a situation which put her inquisitor to confusion, flew into her dear friend's arms.
"How are you, dearest Bab?" she cried. "I am simply perishing for a long, long talk with you. Oh! I have so much to tell you—"
"Not so much as you think, perhaps, wicked one," retorted Barbara, still reproachfully, "but I own I am dying for the key to your mysterious adventures."
"Have you, too, come to cross-question me about last night?" cried Prue petulantly. "Before I was out of my bed, the house was besieged. Ah! here is Peggie, who can tell you more about my visitors than I can, for half of them came while I was yet asleep."
"'Tis not your visitors I want to hear about, Prue, but yourself. To think, that with such a frolic to the fore, my Prue should have left me without a hint of what was happening! How can I ever forgive it?"
"Lady Brooke should be pardoned all things for the sake of her heroism," said Beachcombe, with cold irony. "Yet it seems a pity that she should have braved alone the dangers so many of her friends would willingly have shared."
"You too?" cried Barbara, raising hands and eyes appealingly to the offended heavens. "Can neither matrimony nor paternity cure the Prue-fever?—nor even phlebotomy at the hands of so skilful a chirurgeon as Sir Geoffrey Beaudesert? Pray, if one may venture to inquire, what may be your interest in the recovery of the queen's necklace, since surely it can not be either friendship or love?"
The look he gave her certainly suggested neither of these emotions, but his voice was under better control.
"My interest, dear Lady Barbara, is so far selfish that as the robbery was perpetrated under cover of my domino, I should certainly have wished to take part in the finding of the jewel—and the thief."