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I will just step across to the school now, Elma; and, if you like, you can accompany me." Elma hesitated. She did not yet know what had taken place; but when she had last seen Kitty there was a flash in her eyes the reverse of assuring. She could only hope against hope that nothing had yet taken place; that Kitty had still kept her miserable secret.
"I won't keep you now, Car," said Raynes, turning to Carrie and giving her a somewhat clumsy nod. He looked askance at Elma, and the next moment had clattered down the steps, and, turning the corner, was out of sight. "What a creature!" said Elma. "I wonder you have anything to do with him, Carrie. I think, even for my sake, seeing that Aunt Charlotte is doing so much for me "
At eleven o'clock on the following day I found myself installed in the Hotel de Paris, a comfortable hostelry in the Little Morskaya, having succeeded in evading the vigilance of the spy who had so cleverly followed me from Abo, and in getting my suit-case round from the Hotel Europe. I was beneath the same roof as Elma, although she was in ignorance of my presence.
"I hope all the Tug-of-war girls will be present. The more I think of this affair the more certain I am that it will be the ruin of Kitty Malone." Elma looked sympathizingly at her friend, Alice frowned, Matilda and Jessie did not know where to look, nor what to say. If they had not met Alice and Elma they would have certainly gone heart and soul with Gwin in the matter.
"He'll turn up by-and-by, no doubt. He's pretty sure to find out, sooner or later, Miss Clifford's here, and then he'll come round this way to speak to her." For some time they stood talking in a little group by the bench, Colonel Kelmscott meanwhile thawing by degrees and growing gradually interested in what Guy had to say, while Elma looked on with a devouring curiosity.
Mrs Ramsden, being unaccustomed to the ways of fashionable warfare, was flurried and thrown off her balance by so unexpected an opening to the fray, and had hard work to answer connectedly. She was, moreover, keenly on the alert to watch the meeting between Elma and Geoffrey, whom she had not seen in each other's company since the fatal visit to the Manor.
Cyril Waring, thus dismissed, and as in honour bound, hurried up to London with a mind preoccupied by many pressing doubts and misgivings. He thought much of Elma, but he thought much, too, of sundry strange events that had happened of late to his own private fortunes. For one thing he had sold, and sold mysteriously, at a very good price, the picture of Sardanapalus in the glade at Chetwood.
Before he came here he was the best hated man in Petersburg, and that, they say, is why the Emperor sent him to us." "And he is uncle of this young lady, Elma Heath?" "Uncle? Ah! I don't know that, m'sieur. I have never been told so. His niece poor young lady! can that be? Surely not!" "Why not?" I asked. But the woman gave me no reason; she only exhibited her palms and sighed.
But Cyril had heard of the murder first, and had had that most in his mind when the letter reached him; so he interpreted it at once as referring to the capital charge, and never dreamt for a moment of its real narrower meaning. That evening, when the messenger came back from "kind inquiries" at Woodlands, Elma asked, with hushed awe, how Sir Gilbert was going on.
During those eighteen months, too, Cyril tried, as far as he could, from a stern sense of duty, to see as little as possible of Elma Clifford. He loved Elma still that goes without saying more devotedly than ever; and Elma's profound belief that Cyril's brother couldn't possibly have committed so grave a crime touched his heart to the core by its womanly confidence.
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