Hester Dethridge advanced slowly to the table at which Lady Lundie was sitting. A slate and pencil hung at her side, which she used for making such replies as were not to be expressed by a gesture or by a motion of the head. She took up the slate and pencil, and waited with stony submission for her mistress to begin.
Lady Lundie opened the proceedings with the regular formula of inquiry which she had used with all the other servants,
“Do you know that Miss Silvester has left the house?”
Another affirmative reply. The first which Lady Lundie had received to that question yet. She eagerly went on to the next inquiry.
“Have you seen her since she left the house?”
Hester Dethridge wrote slowly on the slate, in singularly firm upright characters for a woman in her position of life, these words:
“On the road that leads to the railway. Nigh to Mistress Chew’s Farm.”
Hester Dethridge wrote: “I wanted eggs for the kitchen, and a breath of fresh air for myself.”
“Did she take the turning that leads to the railway?”
“What did she do when she got to the moor?”
Hester Dethridge wrote: “She took the footpath which leads to Craig Fernie.”
Lady Lundie rose excitedly to her feet. There was but one place that a stranger could go to at Craig Fernie. “The inn!” exclaimed her ladyship. “She has gone to the inn!”
Hester Dethridge waited immovably. Lady Lundie put a last precautionary question, in these words:
“Have you reported what you have seen to any body else?”
An affirmative reply. Lady Lundie had not bargained for that. Hester Dethridge (she thought) must surely have misunderstood her.
“Do you mean that you have told somebody else what you have just told me?”
“A person who questioned you, as I have done?”
Hester Dethridge wrote on her slate: “Miss Blanche.”
Lady Lundie stepped back, staggered by the discovery that Blanche’s resolution to trace Anne Silvester was, to all appearance, as firmly settled as her own. Her step-daughter was keeping her own counsel, and acting on her own responsibility--her step-daughter might be an awkward obstacle in the way. The manner in which Anne had left the house had mortally offended Lady Lundie. An inveterately vindictive woman, she had resolved to discover whatever compromising elements might exist in the governess’s secret, and to make them public property (from a paramount sense of duty, of course) among her own circle of friends. But to do this--with Blanche acting (as might certainly be anticipated) in direct opposition to her, and openly espousing Miss Silvester’s interests--was manifestly impossible.