Even during the bewildering whirl of those days which had passed so swiftly since she had escaped from the Olive Branch, Sallie had thought very often of Justin Carthew and the strange situation in which circumstances had all conspired to place them toward each other.
Since she had found out what her rehabilitation, as Lady Josceline Justice, was going to cost him, she had been very anxious to see him again and make everything clear between him and her. But she could scarcely disclose to the others that she had met him before. Neither Captain Dove nor Jasper Slyne knew anything about him beyond what they had heard from Mr. Jobling. And Mr. Jobling could or would tell her nothing, in reply to a timid question or two she had put to him, beyond the bare fact that she had nothing to fear from the young American\'s ill-founded claim to her rightful place in the world.
She had been very anxious to see him again. But it had startled and confused her at first to find him, so evidently at home, on the Warder\'s Tower of Loquhariot. For she could not then, before the others, say anything at all of what was in her mind; and she was afraid that he might unguardedly, on the spur of the moment, reveal their unavoidable joint secret.
She could see that he had recognised her at last and that he was no less at a loss than herself. Mr. Jobling\'s gratuitous rudeness to him vexed her very much. The old housekeeper\'s half-hysterical outbreak surprised her beyond expression. And then he was gone, before she could make up her mind that it was her own proper part to have bidden him stay till something could have been settled.
But when she suggested that to Slyne he pooh-poohed the idea as absurd, and told her she ought to be very glad to have got rid of her rival so easily.
He himself was in high glee over that unexpected outcome of Mr. Jobling\'s brusquely peremptory method with the interloper, and Captain Dove\'s face wore a triumphant grin. Mr. Jobling himself seemed inclined to be sulky with her, but the other two only laughed at his petulance.
"We\'ve got possession!" said Slyne exultantly, "and that\'s nine points of the law, as you ought to know. If she hadn\'t taken the fellow\'s part he might have been more inclined to stand his ground. But now—up drawbridge and down portcullis! We\'ll hold the fort here, till that old Chancery Court of yours comes away with its final decision."
Captain Dove poked the portly lawyer in the short ribs. "Buck up, old rarebit!" he begged. "Don\'t look so glum. This is home, sweet home now. Come on down below and I\'ll get you some sort of a bracer from that sour-faced old Scotch hag with the keys. My mouth feels just as if it were made of blotting-paper, too."
"But you must go very slow yet, Dove," Slyne cautioned the elated seaman as he turned toward the stairway. "Don\'t go too fast. We aren\'t safely enough settled yet to—"
Captain Dove paused to look him between the eyes with a mirthless, meaning laugh.
"This is my adopted daughter\'s castle now, Mister Slyne," said he. "When we want any advice from you about how we\'re to behave in it—or anything else—we\'ll let you know. D\'ye see?"
Slyne\'s lips parted and closed again. He had evidently thought better of giving voice to any retort, however effective.
"After you," he remarked politely, since Captain Dove still stood blocking the stairway and grinning fixedly back at him. "I must send down to the inn for Ambrizette and our baggage at once. It will soon be quite dark."
Sallie followed them slowly, like one in a dream, and Mr. Jobling came last. As they reached the circular hall below, Mrs. M\'Kissock, still much perturbed, came hurrying in from the corridor.
"Mr. Carthew has gone, my lady," she said, dropping Sallie another deep curtsey, "and if your ladyship will be pleased to rest here for a little, it will not be long till the West Wing is all in order. I have only two maids to help me, with the castle empty so long, but I have sent down to the village for more, and maybe your ladyship will excuse—"
Sallie went up to her and took hold of the two trembling hands clasped tightly together against a jingling silver chatelaine.
"Janet," she said softly, and the agitated old woman looked gratefully up into her grave, wistful eyes, "I think you and I are going to be good friends, Janet," she said, "because—we have both been so lonely. And I want you not to worry yourself about anything. There\'s no hurry, and we\'ll be quite content here till you have everything arranged as you wish."
"I thank you kindly, my lady," answered Mrs. M\'Kissock, and curtsied again, and was going off about her business, when Slyne signed to her to wait a moment and drew Sallie toward the door.
"I\'ll have to go into a number of matters with you," said he condescendingly to the old housekeeper. "To save Lady Josceline trouble, you\'ll get all your instructions from me."
Mrs. M\'Kissock looked mutely to her new mistress for refutation or confirmation of his right to claim her services so; and Sallie could not but nod as she recalled with a strange, new pang the promise she had made in Genoa, and the lengthy document she had signed in the H?tel de Paris.
"This is Mr. Jasper Slyne, Janet," said she, "and—"
"Her ladyship\'s future—" Slyne was about to explain the importance of his position there when Captain Dove interposed.
"Slyne!" he called across the hall. "If there\'s nothing to drink in the house, whoever goes down to the inn for our baggage had better bring up—"
But Slyne had already got Mrs. M\'Kissock out into the corridor.
"I\'ll send something in at once. Try to keep him quiet for a little," he said to Sallie, and she, having carefully closed the door, went back toward the fireplace to pacify the old man.
A few minutes later a pink-complexioned, flaxen-haired maid came tripping demurely in, with a great silver salver on which was set such an array of decanters that Captain Dove at once became most amiable again.
"And I will bring tea for your ladyship now," said the maid in her quaint Highland accent. "It was the other gentleman that told me to bring this first."
"That was quite right," Sallie reassured her, and asked her name.
"It is Mairi, my lady," the girl answered with a shy, gratified smile, and was very soon back with a beautiful service of Sèvres and a steaming urn.
Mr. Jobling virtuously declined Captain Dove\'s cordial invitation to help himself to a decanter, and asked Sallie for a cup of weak tea. At which the old man was still cackling discordantly when Slyne came in again a few minutes later.
"That\'s an obstinate old baggage!" said he, obviously incensed. "You must tell her, Sal—Lady Josceline, that she\'s to attend to my orders without any more back-talk."
Captain Dove turned in his armchair before the fire.
"That woman\'s my adopted daughter\'s housekeeper now, Mister Slyne," said he, frowning darkly. "And I\'ll trouble you not to interfere in what\'s no concern of yours. You\'re only a visitor here, you know."
Slyne darted a black glance at him, but did not answer him otherwise. "I told her to get your mother\'s rooms ready for you," he mentioned to Sallie. "And Ambrizette will be there by the time you\'ll want her.
"That fellow Carthew has gone off to the inn," he remarked to Mr. Jobling. "I expect he\'ll be busy by now wiring Bolder & Bolder the news."
"That won\'t do him any good," Mr. Jobling returned. "And, even if he had any case to go on with, there\'s nothing more they could do for him until the Hilary Sittings come on—very nearly a fortnight yet. As it is, he hasn\'t a leg left to stand on. You heard what old Gaunt said to her ladyship."
"There\'s no fear of anything getting into the newspapers prematurely, is there?" asked Slyne.
"I told Spettigrew to keep everything quiet," the lawyer answered complacently. "And, besides, they\'re all full to overflowing about the election that\'s coming on."
"I wonder if anyone ever wades through all the lurid twaddle they print at such times?" said Slyne, apparently pleased. And they two maintained a desultory conversation, to which Sallie only listened when it now and then veered back to matters which might affect Carthew or herself, until a sonorous gong began to sound in the corridor.
As its increasing thunder suddenly disturbed the cloistral quiet, Captain Dove, comfortably settled in his armchair beside the fire with a black clay pipe, started up in alarm and spilled the contents of the glass in his hand.
"What the devil are they about out there!" he ejaculated irascibly. "I\'ll blow a hole through that infernal tom-tom if they don\'t drop it."
"Time to dress for dinner," Slyne explained with a tolerant smile, and, rising, rang the bell. "Our rooms will be ready by now, I expect. But there\'s no hurry. All you need to change is your waistcoat."
"Damn nonsense!" snorted Captain Dove, and reaching for a decanter, was liberally refilling his glass when the girl Mairi answered the bell.
"Show her ladyship to her own rooms," Slyne directed. And Sallie followed the demure, flaxen-haired maid very eagerly.
On her way to the West Wing she could not but notice the change which had come over the place. A pleasant atmosphere of ordered activity seemed to pervade the vast building. There were men as well as women-servants busy everywhere. Light and warmth and life had put to flight the darkness and desolation which had come down with the dusk on its emptiness. She gave herself up for the moment to a delicious, childish sensation of snugness and safety there. And when she at length reached the open door of the splendid suite which, Mrs. M\'Kissock had told her, had once been her mother\'s, she felt that she could not, after all, grudge the price she must pay by and by for her glimpse of home.
Ambrizette, with rolling eyes and open mouth, had everything in readiness for her in her dressing-room, for the hideous dwarf was indeed a very efficient femme de chambre. Within half an hour Sallie had had her bath and was dressed again, in the same frock that she had worn at the Savoy. She patted the dumb black creature on the head before turning away from the glass, and paused on the threshold to glance back into the cosy, fire-lit room with eyes which had grown unaccountably dim.
She found Mairi in the main hall, demurely flirting with one of the footmen whom Mrs. M\'Kissock had conjured up, and Mairi showed her into a luxurious drawing-room where Slyne was standing, hands in pockets, before a cavernous, marble-faced fireplace in which a veritable bonfire of logs was cheerily crackling.
His eyes lighted up as she entered. The mirrors about the walls seemed to frame innumerable pictures of her as she crossed the slippery, age-blackened floor toward the big bearskin rug which made an oasis before the fire. He held out his hands to her, dumbly. And just at that moment Mr. Jobling appeared in the doorway, trumpeting into his handkerchief.
Captain Dove arrived shortly after him, under convoy of a scared housemaid who, it seemed, had found him astray in some far corner of the castle and whom he had impressed into his service as guide. The gongs resounded again, just in time to drown his added denunciation of the oak floor, on which he had all but come to grief as soon as he set foot on it. The folding-doors at one end of the long room were pulled apart and a resonant voice announced ceremoniously that dinner was served. Slyne offered Sallie an arm a second or two in advance of the slower Job............