The abrupt questioner was the Duchess, who came bustling in at the moment. "What is strange?" she repeated, with a heightened color and dancing eyes. "Shall I tell you?" She paused and looked brightly at me, holding something concealed behind her. I guessed in a moment, from the aspect of her face, what it was: the letter which I had given to Master Lindstrom in the morning, and which, with a pardonable forgetfulness, I had failed to reclaim.
I turned very red. "It was not intended for you now," I said shyly. For in the letter I had told her my story.
"Pooh! pooh!" she cried. "It is just as I thought. A pretty piece of folly! No," she continued, as I opened my mouth, "I am not going to keep your secret, sir. You may go down on your knees. It will be of no use. Richard, you remember Sir Anthony Cludde of Coton End in Warwickshire?"
"Oh, yes," her husband said, rising on his elbow, while his face lit up, and I stood bashfully, shifting my feet.
"I have danced with him a dozen times, years ago!" she continued, her eyes sparkling with mischief. "Well, sir, this gentleman, Master Francis Carey, otherwise Von Santonkirch, is Francis Cludde, his nephew!"
"Sir Anthony's nephew?"
"Yes, and the son of Ferdinand Cludde, whom you also have heard of, of whom the less----"
She stopped, and turned quickly, interrupted by a half-stifled scream. It was a scream full of sudden horror and amazement and fear; and it came from Mistress Anne. The girl had risen, and was gazing at me with distended eyes and blanched cheeks, and hands stretched out to keep me off--gazing, indeed, as if she saw in me some awful portent or some dreadful threat. She did not speak, but she began, without taking her eyes from me, to retreat toward the door.
"Hoity toity!" cried my lady, stamping her foot in anger. "What has happened to the girl? What----"
What, indeed? The Duchess stopped, still more astonished. For, without uttering a word of explanation or apology, Mistress Anne had reached the door, groped blindly for the latch, found it, and gone out, her eyes, with the same haunted look of horror in them, fixed on me to the last.