“The very thing!” replied the Captain. “Which goes to prove that two heads are better than one—especially, my dear, when one of them happens to belong to your sex. Now I come to think, among other inscriptions in the little church at the Chase was one to the memory of a certain Colonel Lewis Clare who fell in some battle or other a long time ago. Now, what more natural,” he went on with a meaning look at Luigi, “than that your father, instead of naming you after himself, should have preferred to call you after his brave ancestor? Yes, Lewis Clare will do very well indeed—Sir Lewis that will be later on.”
Although Giovanna’s only visible betrayal of the fact was by a touch of unwonted pallor in her cheeks, she was the prey of a dozen conflicting emotions as the doors of Withington Chase were flung wide and she and her uncle crossed the threshold. “And this was my husband’s home when a boy,” was her first thought as her gaze wandered round the entrance hall. “How little I suspected such a thing! There must have been some powerful motive at work to cause him to quit such a roof and to change his name and marry an innkeeper’s daughter and seek a new home thousands of miles away. What was that motive, I wonder?”
“Will you come this way, please,” said the trained voice of the man in livery a second later, and with that they were presently shown into the same morning-room into which the Captain had been ushered the day before.
“And now, my dear, the crucial moment is at hand,” said the Captain to Vanna as soon as they were alone. “I hope you have forgotten none of the points in which I have so carefully coached you up.”
“I don’t think there is much fear of that. I never forget anything which it is essential that I should remember.”
“One last caution, however. Take your time in answering Sir Gilbert’s questions, and, above all things, don’t get flurried.”
“Did you ever know me to get flurried, Uncle Verinder?”
“No, ’pon my word, I don’t think I ever did. But then I have known you such a very short while.”
At this juncture the door opened and Sir Gilbert entered the room.
The Captain and Vanna both rose as he came slowly forward, his eyes fixed scrutinisingly on his daughter-in-law. Her stately presence and the classic beauty of her features impressed him at the first glance, and therewith came a sudden bouleversement of all his preconceived notions of what she would be like. On the spot he acknowledged to himself that he had done her an injustice in his thoughts. After favouring Verinder with a curt nod of recognition, he went up to Giovanna and held out his hand with an air of old-fashioned courtesy.