They
followed Nesta into her mother's sitting-room. And instead of the
semi-invalid whom they had expected to find there, they saw a woman who
had evidently regained not only her vivacity and her spirits but her
sense of authority and her inclination to exercise it.
"I am sorry that you gentlemen should have been drawn into all this
wretched business!" she exclaimed, as she pointed the two men to chairs.
"Everything must seem very strange, and indeed have seemed so for some
time. But I have been the victim of as bad a scoundrel as ever
lived--I'm not going to be so hypocritical as to pretend that I'm sorry
he's dead--I'm not! I only wish he'd met his proper fate--on the
scaffold. I don't know what you may have heard, or gathered--my daughter
herself, from what she tells me, has only the vaguest notions--but I
wanted to tell you, Mr. Eldrick, and you, Mr. Collingwood--seeing that
you're one a solicitor and the other a barrister, that Pratt invented a
most abominable plot against me, which, of course, hasn't a word of
truth in it, yet was so clever that----"
Eldrick suddenly raised his hand.
"Mrs. Mallathorpe!" he said quietly. "I think you had better let me
speak before you go any further. Perhaps we--Mr. Collingwood and I--know
more than you think. Don't trifle, Mrs. Mallathorpe, for your own and
your daughter's sake! Tell the truth--and answer a plain question, which
I assure you, is asked in your own interest.
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