“P.S.—I shall find opportunities (before you leave your room) of speaking separately to my nephew and to Horace Holmcroft. You need dread no embarrassment, when you next meet them. I will not ask you to answer my note in writing. Say yes to the maid who will bring it to you, and I shall know we understand each other.”
After sealing the envelope which inclosed these lines, Lady Janet addressed it, as usual, to “Miss Grace Roseberry.” She was just rising to ring the bell, when the maid appeared with a message from the boudoir. The woman’s tones and looks showed plainly that she had been made the object of Grace’s insolent self-assertion as well as her mistress.
“If you please, my lady, the person downstairs wishes—”
Lady Janet, frowning contemptuously, interrupted the message at the outset. “I know what the person downstairs wishes. She has sent you for a letter from me?”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Anything more?”
“She has sent one of the men-servants, my lady, for a cab. If your ladyship had only heard how she spoke to him!”
Lady Janet intimated by a sign that she would rather not hear. She at once inclosed the check in an undirected envelope.
“Take that to her,” she said, “and then come back to me.”
Dismissing Grace Roseberry from all further consideration, Lady Janet sat, with her letter to Mercy in her hand, reflecting on her position, and on the efforts which it might still demand from her. Pursuing this train of thought, it now occurred to her that accident might bring Horace and Mercy together at any moment, and that, in Horace’s present frame of mind, he would certainly insist on the very explanation which it was the foremost interest of her life to suppress. The dread of this disaster was in full possession of her when the maid returned.