CHAPTER XXVI. MOTHER EVE.
The servant received Emily, on her return from the library, with a sly smile. “Here he is again, miss, waiting to see you.”
She opened the parlor door, and revealed Alban Morris, as restless as ever, walking up and down the room.
“When I missed you at the Museum, I was afraid you might be ill,” he said. “Ought I to have gone away, when my anxiety was relieved? Shall I go away now?”
“You must take a chair, Mr. Morris, and hear what I have to say for myself. When you left me after your last visit, I suppose I felt the force of example. At any rate I, like you, had my suspicions. I have been trying to confirm them—and I have failed.”
He paused, with the chair in his hand. “Suspicions of Me?” he asked.
“Certainly! Can you guess how I have been employed for the last two days? No—not even your ingenuity can do that. I have been hard at work, in another reading-room, consulting the same back numbers of the same newspaper, which you have been examining at the British Museum. There is my confession—and now we will have some tea.”
She moved to the fireplace, to ring the bell, and failed to see the effect produced on Alban by those lightly-uttered words. The common phrase is the only phrase that can describe it. He was thunderstruck.
“Yes,” she resumed, “I have read the report of the inquest. If I know nothing else, I know that the murder at Zeeland can’t be the discovery which you are bent on keeping from me. Don’t be alarmed for the preservation of your secret! I am too much discouraged to try again.”
The servant interrupted them by answering the bell; Alban once more escaped detection. Emily gave her orders with an approach to the old gayety of her school days. “Tea, as soon as possible—and let us have the new cake. Are you too much of a man, Mr. Morris, to like cake?”