Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/93

 too becoming for such an occasion. "Poor Milly would have admired you in it. She had such taste!" Mrs. Ricardo sighed. "And she was fond of gray. She had a gray-embroidered voile this summer that—oh, perhaps she was wearing it on Saturday at Nina Forestier's. I suppose Nina will be a witness too."

Maud and Terry Ricardo drove away from White Fields in a closed brougham, very new and smart, as everything was, or appeared to be, at White Fields, which was a handsome modern house without individuality.

It was but a short distance to Friars' Moat, yet the two places were centuries apart, and as the carnage stopped before the door, Terry thought sadly what a pity it was that this beautiful old house should become hateful forever to its owner, the last of his name. She had told herself, fancifully, day before yesterday, that somehow the place was like Ian; and she felt this still; but both man and house were very tragic now.

Here Ian lived happily with the woman he loved for seven years. Here her murdered body had been brought home, blood-stained and terrible. Here, in some room which she had perhaps helped to make homelike and charming, that body now slept. Here Ian Hereward must go through another agonizing ordeal to-day, only less dreadful than that he had endured when fate led him to find his dead wife in the woods.

The day was one of those perfect days in June,