Page:Hilda Wade (1900).pdf/63

mured. 'I would do anything to help her. . . . I'll tell you what might be a good plan.' Her face brightened. 'My holiday comes next week. I'll run down to Scarborough—it's as nice a place for a holiday as any—and I'll observe this young lady. It can do no harm—and good may come of it.'

'How kind of you!' I cried. 'But you are always all kindness.'

Hilda went to Scarborough, and came back again for a week before going on to Bruges, where she proposed to spend the greater part of her holidays. She stopped a night or two in town to report progress, and finding another nurse ill, promised to fill her place till a substitute was forthcoming. 'Well, Dr. Cumberledge,' she said, when she saw me alone, 'I was right! I have found out a fact or two about Daphne's rival!'

'You have seen her?' I asked.

'Seen her? I have stopped for a week in the same house. A very nice lodging-house on the Spa front, too. The girl's well enough off. The poverty plea fails. She goes about in good rooms, and carries a mother with her.'

'That's well,' I answered. 'That looks all right.'

'Oh yes, she's quite presentable: has the manners of a lady—whenever she chooses. But the chief point is this: she laid her letters every day on the table in the passage outside her door for post—laid them all in a row, so that when one claimed one's own one couldn't help seeing them.'

'Well, that was open and above-board,' I continued, beginning to fear we had hastily misjudged Miss Sissie Montague.

'Very open—too much so, in fact; for I was obliged to note the fact that she wrote two letters regularly every day of her life—"to my two mashes," she explained one after-