Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/151

 Nora knew as well as if she had been told, how people were asking Mrs. Haynes, in lowered tones: "Hasn't she said anything even to you?" Don't you think she really knows where Ian Barr is?" "Do you suppose he was with her in the woods that day?" and "How awful if a clergyman's daughter should have borne false witness!"

The girl did not want to stay in the vicarage of Riding St. Mary, and did not mean to stay. But—she did not know where to go, or what to do. She guessed, even though no one had said such a thing to her, that, to a certain extent, she was under surveillance. She was supposed to be aware of Ian Barr's whereabouts, and wherever she went she would be watched by the police. She had very little money, because she had been using most of her very generous salary as Lady Hereward s companion, to pay off some debts of her dead father's; yet she was determined not to accept any, if offers of charity should be made to her. As for finding another situation, in the present position of affairs, it would be almost impossible. Nobody, or at least "nobody nice," as Nora put it to herself, would want to employ a girl who had had such notoriety thrust upon her. Even if people did not believe that she had perjured herself, they would scarcely like to take "that Miss Verney of the Hereward murder case" as a companion for themselves, or a nursery governess for their children.