Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/122

 detective-inspector from Scotland Yard. She bad known, the moment she saw Major Smedley, what would happen. "How like him," she thought, "to come here and mix himself up in this awful business, just because of the prominence it will give him in his clubs! He has volunteered to come and bear witness and he has put them up to ask me things that without some horrid hint from him wouldn't even have seemed of importance."

Suddenly, in her disgustful anger against the man, she ceased to be afraid. She knew that when Major Smedley had a grudge against people he made a boast of "paying them out," if it took half his life; and he had had a grudge against her for thirteen years. She had been a very popular girl in Indian society, and had snubbed him with all the frankness of youth, when he tried to be "nice to her." Many women would have liked to do the same, but did not dare. He knew too much about them, and to have a weapon was to use it, with Major Smedley. But there was nothing which a girl of eighteen need fear to have known about herself; and hating the character of a malicious male gossip more than most others, she had taken some pleasure in being disagreeable to the "horrid old tabby." Ian had snubbed him, too; for Captain Hereward had little more to hide from the world in those days than had Miss Teresina Ricardo, the débutante; and even if he had secrets to keep, he was not the sort of man