Bob Letsom proposed a round game at cards--Speculation. His sister, Fanny, objected; speculation was nothing but screaming, she said, and we couldn't sit down to cards by daylight. She proposed music; she thought great things of her singing: Bob retorted that music might be shot, and they talked at one another a bit. Finally we settled to play at "Consequences." This involves, as everyone knows, sitting round a table with pencils and pieces of writing-paper.
I sat next to Tom Chandler, Jane Preen next to me. Fanny was on the other side of Tom--but it is not necessary to relate how we all sat. Before we had well begun, Chandler put his pencil on the table, carelessly, and it rolled past me.
"Why, that is Oliver's pencil!" exclaimed Jane, picking it up.
"Which is?" quietly said Tom. "That? No; it is mine."
Jane looked at it on all sides. "It is exactly like one that Oliver has," she said. "It fell out of a drawer in his room the other day, when I was counting up his collars and handkerchiefs. He told me he brought it from Tours."
"No doubt," said Tom. "I bought mine at Worcester."
In taking the pencil from Jane, Tom's eye caught mine. I did feel queer; he saw I did; but I think he was feeling the same. Little doubt now who had changed the note!
"You will not talk of it, will you?" I whispered to Tom, as we were dispersing about the room when the game was over.
"No," said he, "it shall not come out through me. I'm afraid, though, there's no mistake this time, Johnny. A half doubt of it has crossed my mind at odd moments."
Neither would I talk of it, even to Tod. After all, it was not proof positive. I had never, never thought of Oliver.
The Letsoms had a fine old garden, as all the gardens at Crabb were, and we strolled out in the twilight. The sun had set, but the sky was bright in the west. Valentine Chandler, for he had come in, kept of course by Jane Preen's side. Anyone might see that it was, as Tod called it, a gone case with them. It was no end of a pity, Val being just as unsteady and uncertain as the wind.
People do bolder things in the gloaming than in the garish daylight; and we fell to singing in the grotto--a semi-circular, half-open space with seats in it, surrounded at the back by the artificial rocks. Fanny began: she brought out an old guitar and twanged at it and sang for us, "The Baron of Mowbray;" where the false knight rides away laughing from the Baron's door and the Baron's daughter: that far-famed song of sixty years ago, which was said to have made a fortune for its composer.