“You don’t know what you did for me when you lent me Judy,” he wrote. “She has grown very dear to me, and I have persuaded her, I think, to let me settle something on her. As I pointed out to her, if you had married me, as she often says you ought to have done, she would have been, to all practical purposes, my granddaughter. My wants are simple, and I have only my niece Monica and Miss McPherson to think of, and they are already arranged for. Judy has given me an added interest in life, and as I tell her, I feel I’m buying shares in the coming generation. I have every faith in the company and mean to be godfather to all the dividends. You see I am taking it for granted that she will marry the fellow she ran over. If she doesn’t marry him she will need some money of her own all the more. The child says I have poured every good gift into her lap!
“Well, well, I wish I could come back with her, but that tyrant McPherson says no. It will not be long though, Claire, I promise you. I am living on anticipation—unsatisfying fare. You don’t suppose, do you, that I shall have to go on living on it? You don’t suppose that anything could happen to prevent it? What a worrying old fool I am! Of course it can’t and won’t.
“Connie is a widow! Perhaps this is not breaking it gently, but personally I think it is excellent news. Chiozzi died from a stab over the heart. He was motoring from Cannes to Monte Carlo at night along the Upper Corniche Road in Mlle. Pauline’s car. That is all that is known. The lady, her maid, her car and her chauffeur have vanished. I think Judy prepared you for this. Will you tell Connie? Perhaps she has already heard through her solicitors in Paris. I don’t think she will grieve.
“I hope that a telegram to say I am leaving will be the next word you receive from me. Pray that it may.
“Yours,
“Stephen.”
[CHAPTER XXII]
Judy reached London at ten o’clock one night, tired but in the best of spirits. She felt that she was returning, thanks to Stephen, to a new life. Eaton Square no longer seemed to her a prison. Money had opened the doors of that solemn house. Millie’s powers of suppression and repression had been lessened. Noel’s departure for Germany no longer hung over her like a tragedy. What was there to prevent her going to see him half way through that interminable year?
She felt that she had never appreciated money before. It cut binding ropes like a knife. It gave one seven league boots. A pair of wings, too. People who belittled its powers were either hypocrites or fools. Why did old people prefer to make young people glad when they were dead instead of glad while they were alive?
After helping to disentangle her luggage, Noel took her back to the dark house in Eaton Square. A light had been left burning half way up the stairs, but Millie, as a protest against this trip that she had never approved of—“It isn’t as though Mr. de Lisle were a relation,” she had frequently said—had gone early to bed, followed by her obedient John.
The two crept up to Judy’s room and talked until nearly two. Noel heard all about Cannes and about the people she had met there, including Mr. Colebridge, whom he at once decided he wanted to know.
“He’s coming to London in a few days,” said Judy, “so your wish may be granted.”
Finally he consented to talk about himself. He had heard that afternoon that their departure had been postponed and that they were not leaving for a week—he and his chief with the ridiculous name. He thought he was going to like the job, and it was wonderful how his German was beginning to come back to him at the very thought of the journey.
“The only drawback to the whole thing,” he said, “is the feeling that I’m leaving you to fight your battles alone.”