“I won’t ask to see Miss Steinherz to-night,” said Lady Caerleon, with some coldness; “but if she feels well enough in the morning——”
“If you please, miss,” said Félicia’s maid, entering the room, “Miss Steinherz have woke up all of a tremble, and she says will her ladyship go and see her for a moment, if she would be so kind?”
“I’ll just speak to her,” said Maimie quickly, and she hastened to Félicia’s room. “Fay,” she whispered hurriedly, “you won’t have Lady Caerleon see you to-night, will you? I didn’t want to bring her along till to-morrow, when I’ve got things fixed. I’ve planned it all out for us to go right back home at once, so’s you won’t have to come to any conclusion yet, and then in the spring we’ll cross to Europe just by ourselves and have an elegant time.”
“You make me tired—you and your plans and plots!” cried Félicia vehemently. “I’m so nervous I could fly, and I want to see somebody quiet and restful. That’s what I feel all the time with Usk. He’s not smart, but he’s real good. Just bring his mother right along in.”
Warned by the shrill voice and gleaming eyes, Maimie obeyed without a word, wondering maliciously what Lady Caerleon would think of the unconventional greeting she would probably receive. But Félicia made her way to her visitor’s heart at once. After one look at the calm beautiful face bent over her, she rose impulsively and threw herself into Lady Caerleon’s arms.
“Oh, love me!” she cried. “Pet me, just as if I was a baby again!”
“Oh, my darling!” cried Lady Caerleon, taken by storm. “Are you come to me instead of my Phil? I have lost her, you know; she was married last year, and I have wanted a daughter so much.”
She held the quivering form in her arms, stilled the sobs which broke forth, murmured tender names, until Félicia consented to lie down again, and then sat by her until she fell asleep, Maimie watching in the background, with bitter jealousy gnawing at her heart. She, who had mothered Félicia since she was nine and Félicia six, was nothing to her now that this Englishwoman had come on the scene. Then she remembered certain previous experiences of the kind, and was comforted. Félicia had turned from her before, in transient fits of virtue or of friendship, but she had always come back.
“She is the dearest girl!” Lady Caerleon said to her husband, with tears in her eyes, when she was at length free to seek her own room; “very unconventional—quite a child of nature, but my heart went out to her. It seemed as if she had always felt the want of a mother so terribly, and to-night, of course, worse than ever.”
During the days that followed, not only Félicia, but Maimie, learned to be thankful for the presence and countenance of Usk’s parents. The reporters had been inclined to invent scandalous stories on the strength of the supposed likeness between the murdered American millionaire and the Pannonian Archduke, but when Lord Caerleon, backed by the police and the hospital officials, assured them that the likeness was purely a delusion of the murderer’s, they were forced to restrain their exuberant fancy. As for Usk, he stood uneasily aloof when discussions of this kind were taking place, wondering at the blindness of the experts. With his mind’s eye he saw continually one of the chief treasures of Llandiarmid, a snuff-box presented to his great-grandfather when a young soldier by the aged Emperor Matthias of Pannonia, the great-grandfather alike of the present Emperor and of Mr Steinherz, in recognition of a gallant deed of arms done under his own eye. The monarch’s portrait, set in diamonds, ornamented the lid of the box, and it seemed almost incredible to Usk that his father could look at the face of the murdered man and not recall at once the miniature which was so familiar to him.