The door having closed, the pair were left alone. Then the Earl lay listening attentively to the all-important secret report which Darnborough had travelled down there to make.
CHAPTER XVI.
JEAN HAS A SURPRISE.
Jean, thus dismissed, descended to the library, where, across the dark crimson carpet, the last rays of the gorgeous sunset slanted in through the high windows in which were set the armorial bearings of the dead-and-gone Bracondales in stained-glass escutcheons.
She crossed the great sombre apartment and stood gazing through the diamond panes away over the level green of the broad park to where the sea lay bathed in the golden light of the dying day.
Her eyes were fixed vacantly into space. She was thinking—thinking again of that fateful paragraph in the paper—the unexpected news which had rendered her a widow. And poor Adolphe? Alas! though he had been her only friend and full of sympathy for her, yet he was now wearing out his days in penal servitude at the dreaded Devil’s Island.
She thought of him often with feelings of pity. Though a criminal of a criminal stock, ill-bred, and with scarcely any education, yet he had behaved to her as few men had behaved. He had always held her in high esteem and respect. Even as she stood there she could hear his high-pitched voice addressing her as “Madame.”
Upstairs, by the bedside of the sick Cabinet Minister, the thin, grey-faced man, “the eyes and ears of the Cabinet,” was making a secret report to his lordship.