The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon

at the face of the sleeper; still longer, still more earnestly at the face of Lady Audley, which was slowly recovering its natural hues.

      “He has not been very ill, has he?” Robert asked, in the same key as that in which Alicia had spoken.

      My lady answered the question.

      “Oh, no, not dangerously ill,” she said, without taking her eyes from her husband’s face; “but still we have been anxious, very, very anxious.”

      Robert never relaxed his scrutiny of that pale face.

      “She shall look at me,” he thought; “I will make her meet my eyes, and I will read her as I have read her before. She shall know how useless her artifices are with me.”

      He paused for a few minutes before he spoke again. The regular breathing of the sleeper the ticking of a gold hunting-watch at the head of the bed, and the crackling of the burning logs, were the only sounds that broke the stillness.

      “I have no doubt you have been anxious, Lady Audley,” Robert said, after a pause, fixing my lady’s eyes as they wandered furtively to his face. “There is no one to whom my uncle’s life I can be of more value than to you. Your happiness, your prosperity, your safety depend alike upon his existence.”

      The whisper in which he uttered these words was too low to reach the other side of the room, where Alicia sat.

      Lucy Audley’s eyes met those of the speaker with some gleam of triumph in their light.

      “I know that,” she said. “Those who strike me must strike through him.”

      She pointed to the sleeper as she spoke, still looking at Robert Audley. She defied him with her blue eyes, their brightness intensified by the triumph in their glance. She defied him with her quiet smile — a smile of fatal beauty, full of lurking significance and mysterious meaning — the smile which the artist had exaggerated in his portrait of Sir Michael’s wife.

      Robert turned away from the lovely face, and shaded his eyes with his hand; putting a barrier between my lady and himself; a screen which baffled her penetration and provoked her curiosity. Was he still watching her or was he thinking? and of what was he thinking?

      Robert had been seated at the bedside for upward of an hour before his uncle awoke. The baronet was delighted at his nephew’s coming.

      “It was very good of you to come to me, Bob,” he said. “I have been thinking of you a good deal since I have been ill. You and Lucy must be good friends, you know, Bob; and you must learn to think of her as your aunt, sir; though she is young and beautiful; and — and — you understand, eh?”

      Robert grasped his uncle’s hand, but he looked down as he answered: “I do understand you, sir,” he said, quietly; “and I give you my word of honor that I am steeled against my lady’s fascinations. She knows that as well as I do.”

      Lucy Audley made a little grimace with her pretty little lips. “Bah, you silly Robert,” she exclaimed; “you take everything au serieux. If I thought you were rather too young for a nephew, it was only in my fear of other people’s foolish gossip; not from any —”

      She hesitated for a moment, and escaped any conclusion to her sentence by the timely intervention of Mr. Dawson, her late employer, who entered the room upon his evening visit while she was speaking.

      He felt the patient’s pulse; asked two or three questions; pronounced the baronet to be steadily improving; exchanged a few commonplace remarks with Alicia and Lady Audley, and prepared to leave the room. Robert rose and accompanied him to the door.

      “I will light you to the staircase,” he said, taking a candle from one of the tables, and lighting it at the lamp.

      “No, no, Mr. Audley, pray do not trouble yourself,” expostulated the surgeon; “I know my way very well indeed.”

      Robert insisted, and the two men left the room together. As they entered the octagon ante-chamber the barrister paused and shut the door behind him.

      “Will you see that the door is closed, Mr. Dawson?” he said, pointing to that which opened upon the staircase. “I wish to have a few moments’ private conversation with you.”

      “With much pleasure,” replied the surgeon, complying with Robert’s request; “but if you are at all alarmed about your uncle, Mr. Audley, I can set your mind at rest. There is no occasion for the least uneasiness. Had his illness been at all serious I should have telegraphed immediately for the family physician.”

      “I am sure that you would have done your duty, sir,” answered Robert, gravely. “But I am not going to speak of my uncle. I wish to ask you two or three questions about another person.”

      “Indeed.”

      “The person who once lived in your family as Miss Lucy Graham; the person who is now Lady Audley.”

      Mr. Dawson looked up with an expression of surprise upon his quiet face.

      “Pardon me, Mr. Audley,” he answered; “you can scarcely expect me to answer any questions about your uncle’s wife without Sir Michael’s express permission. I can understand no motive which can prompt you to ask such questions — no worthy motive, at least.” He looked severely at the young man, as much as to say: “You have been falling in love with your uncle’s pretty wife, sir, and you want to make me a go-between in some treacherous flirtation; but it won’t do, sir, it won’t do.”

      “I always respected the lady as Miss Graham, sir,” he said, “and I esteem her doubly as Lady Audley — not on account of her altered position, but because she is the wife of one of the noblest men in Christendom.”

      “You cannot respect my uncle or my uncle’s honor more sincerely than I do,” answered Robert. “I have no unworthy motive for the questions I am about to ask; and you must answer them.”

      “Must!” echoed Mr. Dawson, indignantly.

      “Yes, you are my uncle’s friend. It was at your house he met the woman who is now his wife. She called herself an orphan, I believe, and enlisted his pity as well as his admiration in her behalf. She told him that she stood alone in the world, did she not? — without a friend or relative. This was all I could ever learn of her antecedents.”

      “What reason have you to wish to know more?” asked the surgeon.

      “A very terrible reason,” answered Robert Audley. “For some months past I have struggled with doubts and suspicions which have embittered my life. They have grown stronger every day; and they will not be set at rest by the commonplace sophistries and the shallow arguments with which men try to deceive themselves rather than believe that which of all things upon earth they most fear to believe. I do not think that the woman who bears my uncle’s name, is worthy to be his wife. I may wrong her. Heaven grant that it is so. But if I do, the fatal chain of circumstantial evidence never yet linked itself so closely about an innocent person. I wish to set my doubts at rest or — or to confirm my fears. There is but one manner in which I can do this. I must trace the life of my uncle’s wife backward, minutely and carefully, from this night to a period of six years ago. This is the twenty-fourth of February, fifty-nine. I want to know every record of her life between to-night and the February of the year fifty-three.”

      “And your motive is a worthy one?”

      “Yes, I wish to clear her from a very dreadful suspicion.”

      “Which exists only in your mind?”

      “And in the mind of one other person.”

      “May I ask who that person is?”

      “No, Mr. Dawson,” answered Robert, decisively; “I cannot reveal anything more than what I have already told you. I am a very irresolute, vacillating man in most things. In this matter I am compelled to be decided. I repeat once more that I must know the history of Lucy Graham’s life. If you refuse to help me to the small extent in your power, I will find others who will help me. Painful