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Updated: June 20, 2025
But he caught Martin Hillyard's eye, and recovered his more becoming despondency. Harry Luttrell came in as the baronet settled once more to his task. He laid a shining key upon the table and said: "I found this upon the lawn. It looked as if it might be the key of Mrs. Croyle's room." It was undoubtedly the key of a door. "We'll find out," said the baronet.
A little sob broke from her against her will. But this matter was between her and Harry Luttrell. She sought no counsel from any other. "Then I am very grieved for both of you," said Hillyard. Joan made a movement as if she were about to rise. "Will you wait just a moment?" Martin asked. He guessed that some hint of Stella Croyle's story had reached the girl's ears.
She had a week, a whole week, in the company of Harry Luttrell; and what might she not do in a week if she used her wits and used her beauty! Stella Croyle ran down the stairs like a girl. Jenny Prask shut the door, and, opening a wardrobe, took from a high shelf Mrs. Croyle's dressing-bag. She opened it, and from one of the fittings she lifted out a bottle.
Croyle was in the habit of using for her toilet. She accordingly returned to Mrs. Croyle's bedroom, and to her surprise found it empty. She waited for a quarter of an hour, and then becoming uneasy, went downstairs into the hall. She heard her mistress and some one else talking in the library. Their voices were raised a little as though they were quarrelling. "Quarrelling!"
Stella Croyle, living much alone, had made a companion of her maid. There was nothing of Mrs. Croyle's history which Jenny Prask did not know, and very few of her hopes and sorrows were hidden from her. "My gracious me, madam! There will be nobody to hold a candle to you here!" she said, with a sniff, as she helped Stella to undress. Stella looked in the glass.
"I have put out the blue dress with the silver underskirt, madam," said Jenny Prask, knowing well that nothing in Stella Croyle's wardrobe set off so well her dark and fragile beauty. "Very well, Jenny." Stella Croyle answered listlessly. She was discouraged by her experience of that afternoon. She had come to Rackham Park, certain of one factor upon her side, but very certain of that.
Croyle's chauffeur "and he's quite willin' that I should go on with you after we are married." "Then, that's all right," said Stella. Many a one looking backwards upon some terrible and unexpected tragedy will have noticed with what care the great dramaturgist so wove his play that every little unheeded event in the days before helped directly to create the final catastrophe.
The lights are still burning in the room." "Oh!" Martin Hillyard had started to his feet. He remembered another time when the lights had been burning in Stella Croyle's room in the full blaze of a summer morning. She was sitting at the writing-table then. She had been sitting there all through the night making meaningless signs and figures upon the paper and the blotting-pad in front of her.
She saw them drawn to one another across the hall and move into the dining-room side by side. She turned back with a little moan of disappointment into Stella Croyle's bedroom; and whilst she tidied it, more than once she stopped to wring her hands. Stella Croyle, however, kept her good spirits through the evening.
"I should have known that it was Miss Whitworth even if I had not heard her voice," and Jenny described how, on fetching Mrs. Croyle's book, she had seen Joan unlatch the glass door of the library. Sir Chichester was shaken, but he pushed his blotting-paper here and his pen there, and pished and tushed like a refractory child. "And how did she get back?
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