f the stone."

"How long will she stay here?" I asked dismally.

"Till Lord Carwitchet can come and escort her to Paris to visit some
American friends. Goodness knows when that will be! Do go up to town,
Uncle Paul!"

I refused indignantly. The very least I could do was to stand by my poor
young relatives in their troubles and help them through. I did so. I
wore that inferior cat's eye for six weeks!

It is a time I cannot think of even now without a shudder. The more I
saw of that terrible old woman the more I detested her, and we saw a
very great deal of her. Leta kept her word, and neither accepted nor
gave invitations all that time. We were cut off from all society but
that of old General Fairford, who would go anywhere and meet anyone to
get a rubber after dinner; the doctor, a sporting widower; and the
Duberlys, a giddy, rather rackety young couple who had taken the Dower
House for a year. Lady Carwitchet seemed perfectly content. She revelled
in the soft living and good fare of the Manor House, the drives in
Leta's big barouche, and Domenico's dinners, as one to whom short
commons were not unknown. She had a hungry way of grabbing and grasping
at everything she could--the shillings she won at whist, the best fruit
at dessert, the postage stamps in the library inkstand--that was
infinitely suggestive. Sometimes I could have pitied her, she was so
greedy, so spiteful, so friendless. She always made me think of some
wicked old pirate putting into a peaceful port to provision and repair
his battered old hulk, obliged to live on friendly terms with the
natives, but his piratical old nostrils asniff for plunder and his
piratical old soul longing to be off marauding once more. When would
that be? Not till the arrival in Paris of her distinguished American
friends, of whom we heard a great deal. "Charming people, the Bokums of
Chicago, the American branch of the English Beauchamps, you know!" They
seemed to be taking an unconscionable time to get there. She would have
insisted on being driven over to Northchurch to call at the palace, but
that the bishop was understood to be holding confirmations at the other
end of the diocese.

I was alone in the house one afternoon sitting by my window, toying with
the key of my safe, and wondering whether I dare treat myself to a peep
at my treasures, when a suspicious movement in the park below caught my
attention. A black figure certainly dodged from behind one tree to the
ne