“Gently, Stella!  The Major is going to make inquiries about the widow and children when he returns to London.”

“When he returns!” Stella repeated indignantly.  “Who knows what the poor wretches may be suffering in the interval, and what Romayne may feel if he ever hears of it?  Tell me the address again—­it was somewhere in Islington, you said.”

“Why do you want to know it?” Lady Loring asked.  “You are not going to write to Romayne yourself?”

“I am going to think, before I do anything.  If you can’t trust my discretion, Adelaide, you have only to say so!”

It was spoken sharply.  Lady Loring’s reply betrayed a certain loss of temper on her side.  “Manage your own affairs, Stella—­I have done meddling with them.”  Her unlucky visit to Romayne at the hotel had been a subject of dispute between the two friends—­and this referred to it.  “You shall have the address,” my lady added in her grandest manner.  She wrote it on a piece of paper, and left the room.

Easily irritated, Lady Loring had the merit of being easily appeased.  That meanest of all vices, the vice of sulkiness, had no existence in her nature.  In five minutes she regretted her little outburst of irritability.  For five minutes more she waited, on the chance that Stella might be the first to seek a reconciliation.  The interval passed, and nothing happened.  “Have I really offended her?” Lady Loring asked herself.  The next moment she was on her way back to Stella.  The room was empty.  She rang the bell for the maid.

“Where is Miss Eyrecourt?”

“Gone out, my lady.”

“Did she leave no message?”

“No, my lady.  She went away in a great hurry.”

Lady Loring at once drew the conclusion that Stella had rashly taken the affair of the General’s family into her own hands.  Was it possible to say how this most imprudent proceeding might end?  After hesitating and reflecting, and hesitating again, Lady Loring’s anxiety got beyond her control.  She not only decided on following Stella, but, in the excess of her nervous apprehension, she took one of the men-servants with her, in case of emergency!

CHAPTER XII.

THE GENERAL’S FAMILY.

NOT always remarkable for arriving at just conclusions, Lady Loring had drawn the right inference this time.  Stella had stopped the first cab that passed her, and had directed the driver to Camp’s Hill, Islington.

The aspect of the miserable little street, closed at one end, and swarming with dirty children quarreling over their play, daunted her for the moment.  Even the cabman, drawing up at the entrance to the street, expressed his opinion that it was a queer sort of place for a young lady to venture into alone.  Stella thought of Romayne.  Her firm persuasion that she was helping him to perform an act of mercy, which was (to his mind) an act of atonement as well, roused her courage.  She boldly approached the open door of No. 10, and knocked on it with her parasol.