Gwendoline,
now thoroughly alarmed, followed her close on her way to the top
of the stairs. There Mrs. Gildersleeve paused, turned round to her
daughter with a mute look of anguish and held up one hand, palm
outward, appealingly, as if on purpose to forbid her from following
farther. At the gesture, Gwendoline fell back, and looked after her
mother with straining eyes. Mrs. Gildersleeve staggered on, erect,
yet to all appearance almost incapable of motion, and stumbled
down the stairs, and across the hall, and into the drawing-room
opposite. The rest Gwendoline neither saw, nor heard, nor guessed
at. She crept back into her own room, and, flinging herself on her
bed alone as she stood, cried still more piteously and miserably
than ever.
Down in the drawing-room, however, Mrs. Gildersleeve found the
famous Q.C. absorbed in the perusal of that day's paper. She came
across towards him, pale as a ghost, and with ashen lips. "Gilbert,"
she said slowly, blurting it all out in her horror, without one
word of warning, "that dreadful man Nevitt has seen Gwennie again,
and he's told her he knows all, and he means to ruin us, and he's
heard of the marriage, and he's gone down to Mambury to hunt up
the records!"
The eminent Q.
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