'Added to which, he has been the cause of suspicion and vile accusation against my lover and my brother, which it will cost a great deal of patience to forgive. Dear Mr. Dering, I am so sorry for you. It is most wonderful and most mysterious. Suppose,' she laid her hand upon his—'suppose that I was to find out for you——'
'You, child? What can you do, when the others have failed?'
'I can but try.'
'Try, in Heaven's name. Try, my dear. If you find out, you shall be burned for a witch.'
'No. If I find out, you shall be present at my wedding. You were to have given me away. But now—now—Athelstan shall give me away, and you will be there to see. And it will be a tearful wedding'—the tears came into her own eyes just to illustrate the remark—'because everyone will be so ashamed of the wicked things they have said. Sir Samuel will remain on his knees the whole service, and Checkley will be fain to get under the seat.—Good-bye, Mr. Dering. I am a Prophetess. I can foretell. You shall hear in a very few days all about Edmund Gray.'
She ran away without any further explanation. Mr. Dering shook his head and smiled. He did not believe in contemporary Prophecy. That young people should place their own affairs—their love-makings and weddings—before the affairs of their elders, was not surprising. For himself, as he sometimes remembered—and always when this girl, with her pretty ways and soft voice, was with him—her visit had cheered him. He opened his letters and went on with the day's work.
As for Elsie, the smile in her eyes died out as she descended the stairs. If she had been herself a lawyer, she could not have worn a graver face as she walked across the courts of the venerable Inn.
She had established the connection between Mr. Dering and Edmund Gray. It was he, and nobody else, who laid those letters on the table—placed those things in the safe. This being so, it must be he himself, and nobody else, who wrote all the letters, signed the cheques, and did all the mischief. He himself! But how? Elsie had read of hypnotism. Wonderful things are done daily by mesmerists and magnetisms under their new name. Mr. Dering was hypnotised by this man Edmund Gray—as he called himself—for his own base ends. Well—she would find out this Edmund Gray. She would beard this villain in his own den.
She walked resolutely to Gray's Inn. She found No. 22—she mounted the stairs. The outer door was closed. She knocked, but there was no answer. She remembered how George had found his laundress, and visited her at her lodgings—she thought she would do the same. But on the stairs she went down she met an old woman so dirty, so ancient, so feeble, that she seemed to correspond with George's account of her.
'You are Mr. Gray's laundress?' she asked.