She sat down now and opened Mrs. Peveril’s note.  It treated chiefly of the utterly astounding ways that untravelled old lady was meeting with in foreign parts.  “If you will believe me,” wrote she, “the girl that waits on us wears carpet slippers down at heel, and a short cotton jacket for best, and she puts the tea-tray before me with the handle of the teapot turned to me and the spout standing outwards, and she comes right into the bed-room of a morning with Charles’s shaving-water without knocking.”  But the one sentence that arrested Mrs. Carradyne’s attention above any other was the following:  “I reckon that by this time you have grown well acquainted with our esteemed young friend.  He is a good, kindly gentleman, and I’m sure never could have done anything to deserve his wife’s treatment of him.”

“Can she mean Mr. Hamlyn?” debated Mrs. Carradyne, all sorts of ideas leaping into her mind with a rush.  “If not—­what other ‘esteemed friend’ can she allude to?—­she, old herself, would call him young.  But Mr. Hamlyn has not any wife.  At least, had not until to-day.”

She read the note over again.  She sat with it open, buried in a reverie, thinking no end of things, good and bad:  and the conclusion she at last came to was, that, with the unwonted exercise of letter-writing, poor old Mrs. Peveril’s head had grown confused.

“Well, Hubert, did it all go off well?” she questioned, as her nephew entered the room, some sort of excitement on his wasted face.  “I saw them drive away.”

“Yes, it went off well; there was no hitch anywhere,” replied Hubert.  “But, Aunt Emma, I have brought a friend home with me.  Guess who it is.”

“Some lady or other who came to see the wedding,” she returned.  “I can’t guess.”

“You never would, though I were to give you ten guesses; no, though je vous donne en mille, as the French have it.  What should you say to a young man come all the way over seas from India?  There, that’s as good as telling you, Aunt Emma.  Guess now.”

“Oh, Hubert!” clasping her trembling hands.  “It cannot be Harry!  What is wrong?”

Harry brought his bright face into the room and was clasped in his mother’s arms.  She could not understand it one bit, and fears assailed her.  Come home in this unexpected manner!  Had he left the army?  What had he done? What had he done?  Hubert laughed and told her then.

“He has done nothing wrong; everything that’s good.  He has sold out at my father’s request and left with honours—­and is come home, the heir of Leet Hall.  I said all along it was a shame to keep you out of the plot, Aunt Emma.”

Well, it was glorious news for her.  But, as if to tarnish its delight, like an envious sprite of evil, deep down in her mind lay that other news, just read—­the ambiguous remark of old Mrs. Peveril’s.

IV.