The Argosy — page 346: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

326 The Master of Greylands. of a certainty, alone,” she continued, answering her own question. “ He would not have dared it had others been present, and the landlord below says Mr. Castlemaine went by‘himself into the cloisters. Did he fling him imto the sea after he was dead ?—or did he conceal him somewhere in the place? Perhaps he buried him in it P if so, his body is lying in unconsecrated ground, and it will never rest. Marie, then, my little one, what is it? Are you better this morning ?” The child was awaking. She had been baptised and registered in her native place as Mary Ursula. Her grandfather, Basil, never called her anything else; her father would sometimes shorten it to ‘Marie Ursule:” but her mother, not so well accustomed to the English tongue as they were, generally used but the one name, Marie. She looked up and put out her little hands to her mother: her eyes were heavy, her cheeks flushed and feverish. Mrs. Bent privately put down the non-improvement to the tisane. Had the child taken a good wholesome powder over night, she believed she would have been all right this morning. Mr. Parker, the doctor, came in answer to the summons, sent for him: a grey-haired, large-hearted, talkative man, who had private means, and had retired from his large practice at Stilborough to the quietude of Greylands. The little girl had inflammation of the chest, he said, and must stay in bed. e The child’s illness lasted for several days. Sitting by her bed, Madame Guise had time to reflect upon and mature her plans. Her sole object in life now—save and except the child—was to search out the mystery of her husband’s fate ; her one hope to bring home the crime to Mr. Castlemaine. How to set about it she knew not. She would have to account in some plausible manner for her prolonged stay at Greylands, and to conceal her real identity. Above all, she must take care never to betray interest in the fate of Anthony Castle- maine. To stay in Greylands, or in England at all, might be rather difficult, unless she could get some employment to eke out her means. She knew perfectly well that without her husband's signature, the cautious French bankers and men of business who held his property in their hands, * would not advance much, if any, of it to her, unless proofs were forth- coming of his death. She possessed a little income of her own; this was available, and she must concert ways and means of its being transmitted to her in secret, without Greylands learning who she was and what she was. This might be done: but the money would not be enough to support her and her child comfortably as gentlewomen. ‘‘T think I should like to make a sojourn here in Greylands,” she observed to Mrs. Bent, cautiously opening the subject, on the first day that Marie could be pronounced convalescent, and was down in the parlour for change. ° COMIC OOOKS. EO in —_)