The old lady looked them through grimly.
"Pretty vague. No details. Read 'em again, Anthony."
When he had done so, she said: "Well?"
Lady Fenimore objected: "But Althea did stay with you. She must have stayed with you."
"All right, Edith," said Maria, sitting bolt upright. "Call me a liar, and have done with it. I've come here at considerable dislocation of myself and my principles, to bury the hatchet for the sake of unity against the enemy, and this is how I'm treated. I can only go back to Scotland at once."
Sir Anthony succeeded in pacifying her. The letters were evidence that Edith and himself believed that Althea was in Galloway at the time. Maria's denial had come upon them like a thunderclap, bewildering, stunning. If Althea was not in Galloway, where was she?
Maria Beccles did not reply for some time to the question. Then she took the pins out of her hat and threw it on a chair, thus symbolising the renunciation of her intention of returning forthwith to Scotland.
"Yes, Maria," said Lady Fenimore, with fear in her dark eyes, "we don't doubt your word—but, as Anthony has said, if she wasn't with you, where was she?"
"How do I know?"
Maria Beccles pointed a lean finger—she was a dark and shrivelled, gipsy-like creature. "You might as well ask the canal in which she drowned herself."