“Of course I shall accompany you.”
“Thank you all the same, sister, but I think I should prefer to go alone. Five minutes will suffice for all I have to say to Mr. Daykin, and less than that for his answer. I shall take the jewels with me and one or two pieces of the service, just enough to enable him to estimate the value of the whole.”
Miss Jane felt inwardly relieved at the thought of not having to face the banker on such an errand, while reproaching herself for not insisting that it was her bounden duty to accompany her sister.
CHAPTER XXV.
LADY PELL
As soon as luncheon was over next day Miss Matilda prepared to set out on her self-imposed errand. Miss Jane had again offered to go with her and her offer had again been declined. A parcel had been made of the jewellery and one or two pieces of plate, which Tamsin would carry for her mistress as far as the door of Mr. Daykin’s bank, but neither she nor Ethel was aware of what the contents consisted.
Miss Matilda, with rather a sad heart it must be confessed, was in the act of putting on her outdoor things when from the window of her room she saw a pair-horse brougham draw up at the garden-gate, from the box of which a powdered footman presently alighted, and after speaking to someone inside the carriage, opened the gate and entered the tiny demesne. A few seconds later the cottage resounded with a rat-a-tat loud enough to have awakened the seven sleepers. The door was opened by Tamsin, while Miss Matilda ceased her preparations pending the explanation of an incident so strange and unusual.
Presently Miss Jane in person burst into the room in what for her was a state of unwonted excitement.
“Lady Pell—here’s her card—is desirous of an interview with one, or both of the Misses Thursby on a matter of business, and the footman is waiting at the door for an answer,” she exclaimed in a breath. “I never heard her name before—did you, sister? and what can the business be she wants to see us about?”
“That is a question I am no more able to answer than you are,” responded Miss Matilda, who was not so readily flustered as Miss Jane; “but a few minutes will doubtless serve to enlighten us. Will you send word by the man that both of us are at home and shall be pleased to see her ladyship. I will follow you downstairs in a couple of minutes.”
When, three minutes later, Lady Pell entered the little sitting-room the sisters saw before them a woman considerably taller than either of themselves; thin, but not unusually so, and carrying herself with an uprightness that would have done credit to a grenadier. In age she might be anything between sixty and seventy. She had Roman features of a pronounced type which time had served to accentuate, so that it was now difficult to realise that she had ever been accounted handsome. There had always been a certain masculine element about her, more seeming, perhaps, than real, which was not lessened by a faint suspicion of a moustache which, in certain lights, could be seen to shade her upper lip. She was richly but soberly dressed, as became a person who in her day had filled the distinguished position of London’s Lady Mayoress.