“She was known to everyone in the neighbourhood as Sir Gilbert’s daughter-in-law.”
“Can you tell me where to find her? It is requisite that I should see her with as little delay as possible.”
“I have no knowledge of Mrs. Clare’s movements; but her nephew, Luigi Rispani, left me an address at which a letter or message would at any time find him. It would be no trouble to me to run up to town by the next train, hunt up Rispani, and obtain from him the address of Mrs. Clare, with which he is pretty sure to be acquainted.”
“If you will do that for me, Lisle, I shall be infinitely obliged to you.”
“I will start at once. There is a train at twelve-thirty. If I have good luck, I ought to be back by seven o’clock.”
John Clare held out his hand. “Bring me the address at any cost,” he said.
The ring thus strangely recovered had been a present from him to Giovanna Rispani during the period of their brief courtship.
CHAPTER XLVII.
HUSBAND AND WIFE
To John Clare’s wife the world of late had become a greatly-changed place. She was alone in London, without a single creature of her own sex whom she could call an acquaintance, much less a friend. She had broken both with her uncle and Luigi. For the latter she had never cared. He had impressed her from the first as being not only morally unscrupulous—that was a defect which she might not have experienced much difficulty in condoning—but as being sly and deceitful into the bargain, and, in short, one of those people who are almost as dangerous to, and as little to be trusted by, those whom they call their friends as by those to whom they owe a grudge which they would gladly wipe off.
Captain Verinder she had learnt to like after a fashion. He was her mother’s brother, and that of itself was enough to create a tie between them which, under ordinary circumstances, she would have been one of the last people to ignore. She had liked him for his bonhomie, for his persistent good-humour and his half-quizzical, half-cynical way of looking at men and things, and last, but not least, for the frequent doses of flattery he had been in the habit of administering to her, which, even while conscious that it was nothing more than flattery, had possessed the delightful property of raising her in her own estimation, and of causing her to think more highly of herself than she had ever done before.