Annie Haynes Premium Collection – 8 Murder Mysteries in One Volume. Annie Haynes

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      Sir Arthur captured one of the fluttering, trembling hands once more.

      “All that is beside the question, as you said just now, Hilda; the real crux of the matter lies between you and me. Tell me the truth, dear, is it that you do not—cannot care for me?”

      Hilda caught her breath quickly.

      “Ah, no. How could it be that, when you have been so kind, so more than kind to me? When yours was the first face I saw smiling at me out of that dreadful darkness and chaos—”

      Sir Arthur laid his lips softly to the hand he held in his.

      “Then that is all that matters, Hilda—the rest is nothing to us.”

      The girl snatched her hand away.

      “Ah, no, no! I must not forget. There are others to whom this would mean misery—Lady Laura, and Sir Arthur, your cousin—”

      As the last word left her lips two little straight lines came between Hargreave’s level brows.

      “My cousin!” he repeated, and a slight nuance in his tone might have told a keen listener that the reference had grated upon him. “My cousin Dorothy is almost my sister, Hilda; she will soon be prepared to give a sister’s love to you, I hope.”

      In spite of the confident words, however, there was an element of doubt apparent in his manner. The mutual antagonism between the two girls could hardly have failed to make itself felt, especially by him; and he was uncomfortably conscious that, though no binding words had been spoken between them, Dorothy could hardly hold him blameless.

      “As for my mother,” he went on, “she will—she does—love you. But what does all that matter now?” his eyes softening and growing more eager as they rested on her bent golden head. “I cannot think of that now. For these few golden minutes there is no one in the world but just ourselves, Hilda. Ah”—his arms stealing round her, his lips seeking hers—“tell me you care for me just a little, darling!”

      With a passionate gesture of self-surrender Hilda yielded herself to his embrace, and as he took his first kisses from her red lips she murmured brokenly as she turned her face a little away:

      “How could I help it when you have been so good—so good to me? How could I help it?”

      “Thank Heaven you could not help it, my darling!” Sir Arthur said reverently as he drew her head again to its resting-place on his shoulder. “Hilda, Hilda, I can scarcely believe that such happiness can be real!”

      “Perhaps it is not,” the girl whispered unsteadily. “Because do you not see that first”—with a shy hesitating glance—“we must find out who I am?”

      “No, I don’t see,” said Sir Arthur steadily. “I shall tell my mother to-night that I have been lucky enough to win your love. Hilda, Hilda, I can hardly believe—”

      The opening of the door made them start apart with flushed guilty faces as Dorothy came in, glancing at them in an uncertain, doubtful fashion.

      “Aunt Laura says she is sure that you cannot see to paint so late as this, Arthur, and the coffee is in the drawing-room.”

      Meanwhile outside Mavis found herself waylaid by her maid.

      “Oh, if you please, miss, I have just heard that my mother is feeling very poorly to-day. Could you spare me just to run down and see how she is?”

      “Why, certainly, Minnie,” the girl said kindly, “and I hope you will find her better. Isn’t it rather late for you, though. But perhaps Gregory is going to walk down with you?”

      “No, miss, he can’t to-night, he is busy in his houses; but Mrs. Parkyns, she said Alice might come with me.”

      “That is all right then,” Mavis nodded. “Don’t hurry yourself, Minnie, if you’re not afraid of being out in the dusk. I daresay the walk will do you good. You have not been looking very well lately.”

      “I am quite well, thank you, miss! Maybe the heat makes me a bit pale—it does some folks.”

      “Well, if you feel all right, that is the main thing,” Mavis said. “Ask Mrs. Parkyns if she has anything she can give you to take to your mother, Minnie.”

      “Thank you, miss.”

      Mavis turned to meet Garth in the hall; Minnie ran quickly downstairs to tell the still-room maid that she had gained the requisite permission and in a very few minutes the two girls sallied forth. Minnie carefully carrying a covered basket containing certain delicacies provided by Mrs. Parkyns.

      “We will go down the drive,” she said as they turned out of the big paved yard into the shrubbery. “I don’t care for going through the Home Coppice now, it is getting dark.”

      “I don’t care for it, not in the day-time,” Alice avowed openly, “not since they found those things of Nurse Marston’s in it. I—I think I should faint if I should see anything like that.”

      Minnie’s face looked a curiously ashen colour in the twilight.

      “There’s nothing more to be found in the Home Coppice,” she said. “Superintendent Stokes told Jim Gregory that they had searched every inch of it. It is poachers and such-like I think of when I am in the wood.”

      “Or keepers,” Alice suggested with a giggle, glancing at Minnie’s unresponsive face. “I hear that Tom Greyson goes about with a long face enough to turn milk sour. If Nurse Marston went out of the house by the conservatory door”—with a sudden change of subject—“I wonder if she went across the lawn and by the pine-tum to the park on her way to the Home Coppice, or whether—”

      “Who says that she went through the conservatory door?” Minnie demanded.

      “Nobody that I know of. You needn’t be so sharp, Minnie Spencer,” the other said in an injured tone. “I only said if she did—being as it was the nearest way out from the small library, and she must have got out somehow, spite of Mr. Jenkins telling us all the doors were shut. It stands to sense she wasn’t spirited away. Well, as I was saying just now, when you took me up, I wonder whether she made her way by the pinetum and the park, or came through this shrubbery—it would be a bit farther this way, but I reckon she’d choose it on account of being seen as she crossed the lawn. I have thought sometimes as she came no farther.”

      Minnie shivered.

      “How can you talk so, Alice Brown? Do you think—”

      “I mean as I shouldn’t wonder if she had promised to run off for a few minutes just to speak to some murdering villain,” said Alice, dropping her voice to a whisper and looking round fearfully. “There—there is no knowing where she may be now! I wouldn’t come through after dark by myself for a hundred pounds. Who knows if he didn’t make away with her here? Those things found in the Home Coppice the other day show that she was made away with plain enough, I say.”

      “Ugh!” Minnie caught her companion’s arm. “If I had known you were going to talk like this I wouldn’t have come a step—Mercy sakes alive! What was that?”

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