“The box has been to Italy,” he thought.
“Those are the first four letters of the word
Turin, and the label is a foreign one.”
The only direction which had not been either defaced
or torn away was the last, which bore the name of
Miss Graham, passenger to London. Looking very
closely at this label, Mr. Audley discovered that it
had been pasted over another.
“Will you be so good as to let me have a little
water and a piece of sponge?” he said.
“I want to get off this upper label. Believe
me that I am justified in what I am doing.”
Miss Tonks ran out of the room and returned immediately
with a basin of water and a sponge.
“Shall I take off the label?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” Robert answered, coldly.
“I can do it very well myself.”
He damped the upper label several times before he
could loosen the edges of the paper; but after two
or three careful attempts the moistened surface peeled
off, without injury to the underneath address.
Miss Tonks could not contrive to read this address
across Robert’s shoulder, though she exhibited
considerable dexterity in her endeavors to accomplish
that object.
Mr. Audley repeated his operations upon the lower
label, which he removed from the box, and placed very
carefully between two blank leaves of his pocket-book.
“I need intrude upon you no longer, ladies,”
he said, when he had done this. “I am extremely
obliged to you for having afforded me all the information
in your power. I wish you good-morning.”
Mrs. Vincent smiled and bowed, murmuring some complacent
conventionality about the delight she had felt in
Mr. Audley’s visit. Miss Tonks, more observant,
stared at the white change, which had come over the
young man’s face since he had removed the upper
label from the box.
Robert walked slowly away from Acacia Cottage.
“If that which I have found to-day is no evidence
for a jury,” he thought, “it is surely
enough to convince my uncle that he has married a designing
and infamous woman.”
BEGINNING AT THE OTHER END.
Robert Audley walked slowly through the leafless grove,
under the bare and shadowless trees in the gray February
atmosphere, thinking as he went of the discovery he
had just made.
“I have that in my pocket-book,” he pondered,
“which forms the connecting link between the
woman whose death George Talboys read of in the Times
newspaper and the woman who rules in my uncle’s
house. The history of Lucy Graham ends abruptly
on the threshold of Mrs. Vincent’s school.
She entered that establishment in August, 1854.
The schoolmistress and her assistant can tell me this
but they cannot tell me whence she came. They
cannot give me one clew to the secrets of her life
from the day of her birth until the day she entered
that house. I can go no further in this backward
investigation of my lady’s antecedents.
What am I to do, then, if I mean to keep my promise
to Clara Talboys?”
