For answer Miss Matilda pushed the letter across the table to her sister. “Perhaps you had better read it for yourself,” she said. Then turning to Charlotte, she added: “You can leave the room till I ring.”
Miss Jane, with fingers that trembled slightly, brought her pince-nez into requisition and did as her sister had bidden her. “What does it mean?” she asked when she had read it through; but there was a frightened look in her eyes which seemed to indicate that, in part at least, she guessed.
“It means ruin, sister—nothing less than ruin,” replied Miss Matilda in her most solemn tones, “should what is here stated prove on further investigation to be the fact.”
At the word “ruin” Keymer’s marrow seemed to freeze. If the sisters were ruined, where, then, would be the fortune which Ethel was to have inherited as their heiress?
For a while no one spoke. What, indeed, was there to say? The shock was of a kind which words could do nothing to mitigate, and at no time were the sisters in the habit of giving vent to their feelings in futile exclamations. They were of the women who suffer mostly in silence.
Presently, Miss Matilda, reading in the look with which Keymer was regarding her what seemed like a note of interrogation, said to herself: “It is due to him that he should be told the particulars of our loss; for is he not now almost like one of ourselves?” With that she handed him the letter. “Oblige me by reading this, Mr. Keymer,” she said. “Your doing so will save me the necessity of a long explanation.”
He took the letter in silence.
Well might Miss Matilda turn pale when she read it. Briefly stated, the information it conveyed (afterwards supplemented by her for Keymer’s further enlightenment) was to the following purport: The London solicitor through whom, and through whose father before him, nearly all the monetary affairs of the sisters had been managed since the time when they were quite young women, had recently died. Although Mr. Tidson’s cheque for the interest due on account of the various investments he was supposed to have made on their behalf had come to hand with the utmost regularity, the securities which should have represented the investments in question were not now to be found, and there was only too much reason to fear that the dead man had surreptitiously disposed of them from time to time and applied the proceeds to his own use. The letter concluded with an intimation that the sisters should hear further from the writer in the course of a few days.
As Launce Keymer, a little later, walked homeward through the dewy night, the word ruin rang in his ears like a knell. Ethel Thursby (or whatever her right name was, or ought to be) was a charming girl, no one more so—although, perhaps, a trifle too demure and puritanical for his taste—and, as heiress to the spinsters, he would gladly have made her his wife. But to marry her without a shilling to call her own, either now or in time to come, was an altogether different affair.
Launce lost no time on the morrow in laying the case before his father. That astute person, having heard him quietly to the end, said: “What a very fortunate thing it is that this news has come to hand now, instead of later on. Of course the affair must not be allowed to proceed any further till we have ascertained for a fact whether the old maids are, or are not, ruined. After all, it is just possible that the missing securities may turn up and nobody be a penny the poorer. By the way, has the girl any letters written by you in her possession?”