TWO FAIR DAUGHTERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19781, 31 October 1927, Page 16

TWO FAIR DAUGHTERS.

BY STELLA M. DURING.

CHAPTER XVlL—(Continued). Violet stood quite still. It seemed lhat under the shock of a new idea her yery life -was draining out of her. " Vivi," she whispered at last, " isn't it possible, they may think that you shat you—" j Vivi sat straight up, her eyes indig- > >»ant. " How could I?" she demanded. " Can » girl shoot—or stab—with nothing but Jier hands ?" " But —they may not believo you had Nothing in your hands. Vivi's face altered, and then, before flTiolet's incredulous eyes, she laughed. " Are you thinking that perhaps they {trill hang me?' she asked. But Violet stood frozen before a postsibiiity that did not seem to her ridiculous. " Vivi," she whispered, for her voice ■would not come to her dry throat. " I beg, I entreat you to tell Eldon, He is a barrister. He will know what to jio and how io help you!" But once again Vivi's face silenced ker. "Tell Eldon!" ehp repeated. "I'd rather die! I'd rather be hanged! Oh, (Violet, there's the dressing gong. ,1 pan't go down —like this! ' "■No," agreed Violet slowly, " you jpan't." So that the squire came into the drawing room to find only his elder daughter awaiting him. He glanced about him •with a trace of annoyance. " Vivi late again ?" he said. " No, father, Vivi isn't well," Violet lold him. " It's only a headache. She y/ill be all right in the morning." The .jquire put a broad finger under Jier chin and tilted her face upwards. " H'm! You don't look any too bright .yourself," he remarked. " What's upsetting you both ?" Violet turned away. If he could know! If he should ever guess! And while after dinner the squire and his elder girl drank their coffee in the quiet, and companionable solitude-a-deux be so dearly loved, Mrs. Halliford and Jeanie sat alone by an untouched supper table in the solidly furnished dining room at Uplands. It was nine o'clock. The south-west wind that had broken the frost and melted the snow sighed round the farm gables and'a full moon rode gloriously among battalions of flying clouds. Mrs. Halliford sighed with it. " Roger's late," she said at last. Jeanie pulled aside the window curtain and looked out across the farmyard, unlamiliar in its sharply-defined black and ;white. ' "He said he'd be home early," she returned, and the uneasiness in her mother's voice was reflected in her own. " Before six, he said." " Said!" echoed her mother, sharply. Jeanie turned. " He's been home. He came in before I three an' washed, an' changed his clothe 3. Didn't you know, mother ?" " Was he—sober ?" The mother's tone jwras heavy with dread. "Quite!" in quick assurance. '''More like himself than I've seen him—this long time." " Then why isn't he in ?" askud Mrs. Halliford under her breath. The question persisted as the. hours wore away. Ten o'clock! Eleven o'clock —and no " Roger. Mrs. Halliford- sighed. The o.peirence was not unprecedented. More than ouce lately Roger had -not come home, " sleeping out' in barn or stable until he should be fit to present himself to his family. For while the front door was heavily barred and bolted the back was only locked and the key hidden, with a simplicity that was an insult to the least intelligent of burglars, under the mat outside. But when Jeanie came down in the chill blackness of an early January morning the key was still under the mat outside—and there was no Roger. Mrs. Halliford was not alarmed. With Jeanie's help she cooked the generous farm dinner, boiled mutton, piles of carrcts and turnips, a mountain of potatoes, a Gargantuan dish of dumplings. Only when six hungry farm men trooped into the stone kitchen to eat it did a sharp note of surprise, almost terror, invade her voice. " Where's the master ?" " H'ant seen him, missus," replied Ezra. Mrs. Halliford stared at him, skilled, dependable, grey-haired in her service, and went into the dining room where her dinner and Jeanie's was laid. " I want nothing," she said/ a little breathlessly. " I'm going down, village." " Mother, let me. go with you," she begged. ---4. ■ "I'll be glad," returned her mother simply. * Alas—there was no need. As Mrs. Halliford set her foot to Jthe stairs came the sound of men moving slowly up the cobbled farmyard—men carrying-a heavy Iburden. The woman expectant of tragedy for months recognises it unerringly •when it comes. Mrs. Halliford turned, lier face a waxen-like mask. " Roger's come home." she said.

CHAPTER XVIII. They carried him into the home he had ©nee loved so well and of late ceased utterly to care about—Fuller, the headbeeper "up at the Manor;" Johnson, his handsome help; two farming men who had been at work carting gravel. Ho lay on a hurdle roughly covered with coats, the stained, sodden, worthless coats of the very pbor. The big door was unbarred lor his coming. Inside Mrs. Halliford signed for them to take him into his own room, where stood his gun, his fishing rod, his desk crowded with samples of seed and grain and little screwed up packets of artificial manures. Her stoic calm made it easier for thoss who had brought him. One would have thought her unmoved but that death lay in her eyes "How?" she asked. We don't know, ma'am," As a, rule. Fuller would not have said " Ma am to Mrs. Halliford, but to-day hers was the majesty of grief. " Only that he has been shot. We—Johnson an' me were going up to the further spinney wiih some grain for the pheasants —there s not much about for them yet —when my little dog Floss ran off the path and started whimpering and yelping. We went, Johnson an' me, to see what she had found, and it was—that." " And then ? Hush, my girl!" almost with reproof, for Jeanie had thrown herself beside her brother's body in a very passion of crying. " I stayed, and Johnson went back and fetched the squire and Dr. Sinclair and the police." " MargerisDii ?"—almost- sharply. " There were others. Margerison telephoned to Westover and three came, better men than Margerison. Dr. Sinclair nid he could do nothing, he, your son. had been dead more than twelve hours. We didn't touch him, we didn't even turn him over til! the police came. Then Dr. Sinclair said he had been shot twice, through the lungs first and then through the heart. It wasn't suicide, he =aid, couldn't have been because there was no weapon, nothing he eould have done it with. The police went through his pocketr. and took everything they found and alter a bit th* squire said we had better bring him home." Mrs. Halliford rose, tragic in her tearJess woe, and stood over her children, the boy sha had worshipped—dead, the girl for whom she had only an indulgent tolerance —alive. " May God in His mercy help me to lay jfiiy hands on—the one who did this," ) said.

(COPYRIGHT.)

" Amen," agreed Fuller solemnly, and then with a curious look, " You think you know ?" " Yes," she returned quietly. The squire came in late for lunch. He looked pale and worried, more disturbed than Violet had ever before seen him. She waited, her eyes more revealing than she knew, fixed on her father's face. The two were alone. "This is a shocking affair?" he began. "What is?" asked Violet—and hated herself. " Young Halliford is dead," he said. " They found him in the larch wood a good two miles away, shot through the heart." Violet leant back in her chair for the strength had gone out of her. " Shot," she echoed in a whisper. It was the confirmation of her worst fears. Desperately she struggled to recover herself. " Then—has he shot himself ?" 1 she asked. The squire shook his head. " They think not," he returned. " They were not able to find any weapon —and if he had shot himself it must have been near. No, they think someone shot him. . Why, they had no notion. They, the police, are interviewing the poor mother this morning. Jove, but I'm sorry for her. She thought the world of" him. They'll bring any suggestions she may make to me, as the nearest magistrate, together with anything significant that they may have found on the body. They searched him, oi' course." The room turned dark before Violet's eyes. Vivi's letters! Her father looked at her with anxiety. " I ought not to have told you so suddenly. It has upset you, my dear, and very naturally," he said kindly. " There. We'll talk of something else. How's Vivi ?" Violet felt her lips go cold. Was there some subtle connection of ideas in her father's mind, or was it simply coincidence ? In any case it was sufficiently sinister. " She isn't at all weil," she answered as steadily as her throbbing pulses would let her. " But I don't think it is anything serious. She is better to-day . than she was yesterday—" which was true. " I think she will be down to dinner." For she must. She must! The last thing possible was that Vivi should be 01 now. " H'm. If she isn't we'll have Sinclair in. I don't like my little Vivi upstairs," returned the squire, and Violet's heart turned to water. Dr. Sinclair with his keen eye, his trained intelligence, his unerring instinct, that would at once diagnose a mind diseased! " I don't think that will be necessary, Dad. I'm sure she will be all right by the evening," she told him. and his mind swung back to the morning's tragedy. " I shall have to go and see her, that poor woman, I mean," he began, and Violet sat aghast. What might not that poor mother say—if he did. " Father, let me go," she suggested. " I know her much better than you do. She will be more at home —with me." And Mrs. Halliford could tell her no more than she knew already. The squire jumped at the suggestion. "My dear. I'll be glad—if you really think 'it- won't be too much for you," he said with a relief there was no hiding. " I've' dreaded it—l can't tell you how much." " It is much better that I should go," returned Violet, quietly. And it was all of no use. Her efforts to avoid catastrophe, to turn aside Fate, were all of no avail if in one of Roger's pockets had been found Vivi's letters. The horrible possibility, almost certainty. hung blackly over them both. " Vivi, you must- get well," she told her, feverishly. "Itis a certainty, if you don't, that he will connect the two things, will ask if your illness has by any possibility something to do with Roger's death. I saw the question forming in his mind this morning, though I don't think he was conscious of it himself." " What is the use ?" asked Vivi, her pillows muffling her voice. "He will be beyond any need of questions—if they find my letters." Would they? Had they? She must know, and the first glance at her father's ' face would tell her. She struggled up in the evening and ; made a careful " toilette" with Therese's incomparable help. The handmaiden ran 1 critical dark eyes over her when she had ' finished. ' " A teeny, teeny touch of colour," she suggested. "Mademoiselle is to-day so ■ pale, so wan." "Oh, have it your own way," she I assented, indifferently, and for the first time in her life the wild-rose flush on 1 her soft chsek was not her own. 5 And when she got downstairs her ' father looked much as usual. He took 5 her face between his hands and kissed it, murmuring how glad he was to see his r " little pussie" well again. Vivi kissed him back, with more feeling than usual, and breathed again. But as the evening wore on, quiet and uneventful, terror seized her once more. She was silent, afraid lest her tongue betray her, and her silence was so unusual that it deeply disquieted the squire. Violet took her refuge at the piano, but the thought of Mrs. Halliford kneeling beside her dead son unconsciously influenced her fingers, and the heartbreaking cadences of " Londonderry" wailed in the quiet room. The squire rose almost ' irritably. I " That's rather a dismal din, my dear. Can't you play something cheerful ?" be 5 asked, "and surprised her eyes with tears > in them. " I wish I hadn't told you, ! I wish I hadn't," he muttered, and went ' out to shut himself in his own study. ; Violet carrie over to her sister. ' " Oh, Vivi," she whispered—but Vivi put up a pale hand. 1 " For Heaven's sake don't begin > again," she said. " We've said all there 1 is to say. Ail we can do now is—wait." * They had not to wait long. A prolonged ring and a knock heavy with 1 authority echoed in the quiet hall. Then ! came a'strange voice, quiet and deep. "Can i see Squire Coombe?" it said. Violet felt her hands go cold and her throat dry. Vivi raised herself, her ' eyes shining like stars. " It's the police," she said. s After which came another long wait, : during which Violet was chiefly conscious of a deep thankfulness that they had no visitors before whom appearances must be kept up. At least they could be natural. When nearly an hour had gone by Vivi rose. " J—can't bear any more," she said in a dull whisper. "He won't be surprised—if Igo to bed. Come up—and tell me." Violet nodded, every faculty she had absorbed in a very anguish of listening. But she could hear nothing. Nothing. The clock struck nine ! —half-past!—ten ! half-past! When it was nearly eleven it dawned upon her that her father in his tender de&ire to keep from her further painful details, did not intend to come back to the drawing room Suddenly her heart -seemed to stand still. Was it that? Or was he sitting enlightened and overwhelmed ? Slowly her leaden feet carried her across the hall to her father's room. There sat the squire at his desk, looking grave but otherwise much a3 usual. , " I've come to say good-night, daddie," she told him, her voice sounding faint ; and far-away, odd in her own ears. But j he seemed to notice nothing amiss. [ " Vivi gone to bed ?" he asked. " Yes. She went when you were busy. What-happened, father? I—l suppose , it was the police who came." » " Yes. But nothing has happened fc yet. nothing of importance, I mean." Violet went upstairs unconscious of i going. Where were Vivi's letters—and * Vivi's revolver 1 IT® lit continued daily, J