Page:Braddon--Wyllard's weird.djvu/15

Rh she cried anxiously, looking at him from top to toe, suspicious of some deadly injury which he might be heroically concealing.

"No, it was not a railway accident. There is no one hurt except a poor girl who threw herself, or was thrown, out of the train."

"How terrible!" exclaimed Mrs. Wyllard. "Is it any one we know—any one about here?"

"No, she is quite a stranger, poor child, and from her dress and general appearance I should take her to be a Frenchwoman. But we shall know more after the inquest."

"How very sad! A stranger alone in a strange land, and to meet such a death! But do you really believe that any one threw her out of the train, Julian? That seems too horrible to be true."

"My dear, I believe nothing. The poor creature's fate is shrouded in mystery. Whether she killed herself or whether any one killed her is an open question. I told the guard and the station-master to be on the alert, and to stop any suspicious character. I shall call at the police-office as we drive through the town. Here is Bothwell," added Wyllard, as the young man came sauntering lazily along. "Did you know that he had gone to Plymouth?"

"Not I," replied Mrs. Wyllard. "He did not appear at luncheon, but as he is always erratic I did not even wonder about him. What took you to Plymouth this morning, Bothwell?" she asked, as her cousin came up to the carriage door.

They were first cousins, and it was his cousinship with Julian Wyllard's beautiful wife which secured Bothwell Grahame free quarters at Penmorval. They were children of twin sisters who had loved each other with more than common love, who had seldom been parted till death parted them untimely. Bothwell's mother was cut off in the flower of her youth and beauty, leaving her only child an infant, and her husband a broken-hearted man. Captain Grahame went to India with his regiment, less than a year after his wife's death, to fight and fall in the Punjaub, and Bothwell, the orphan, was brought up by his mother's sister, Mrs. Tregony Dalmaine, at a fine old manor-house near the Land's End.

He was two years younger than Theodora Dalmaine, and he was to the child as a younger brother. They were brought up together, played together, and shared the same schoolroom and the same governess, till Bothwell was drafted off to Woolwich, having set his heart upon being a soldier, and in his father's regiment. The bright, quick-witted girl was considerably in advance of the boy in all their mutual studies. She was industrious where he was idle, for it must be owned that even in the beginning of things Bothwell was somewhat scampish in his mind and habits.