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come long since with no letters for her. Nor was it possible for her to have taken a coach out of town. The hour was not right. She either walked or was picked up in a private carriage. I cannot think she walked, with a large valise. The police—I spoke to them before going to meet you—have been making investigations. No one saw her walking. She would hardly have headed off through the hills alone. Someone met her. It is a great mystery, but I can only assume it was an affair of the heart,” he said, with a passing glance off Lucien, as though to say “we know how it is, but will say no more before the boy.”
    “Miss Little did not have a beau, Uncle,” Lucien informed him, very matter-of-factly. “She often lamented the fact.”
    I looked at him, surprised anew at his ancient ways. To use such a word as “lamented” was not what one expected of a very child, and to be aware of the state of his governess’s heart too was precocious. He looked up and caught me regarding him. He smiled, very slyly, I thought. I made a mental note that we would discuss the matter again in privacy. No stone would be unturned in my effort to prove my father innocent.
    “Do you have a beau, Miss Stacey?” Lucien asked.
    “You are very interested in romance for a young fellow!”
    “I will be your beau, if you like,” he offered.
    “Thank you, but you are a little too old for me,” I replied with a damping glance.
    “I don’t think so. Uncle Charles and Aunt Stella are a May and December match, and they rub along very well,” he answered.
    Beaudel flushed a little pink. “Chatterbox. Miss Stacey is not interested in our family matters,” he chided gently.
    “Yes, she is. Servants are always interested in family matters. Miss Little told me so. She was always interested in us.”
    “Did Miss Little not tell you that children do not contradict their elders?” I asked playfully.
    “I can’t recall she ever did, but she told me so many things I may have forgotten a few of them.”
    Glanbury Park lay roughly five miles from the town of Chelmsford. During the last of the trip we all fell into an uncomfortable silence. We had said all we had to say to each other, and turned our thoughts inwards. It occurred to me then for the first time that what I was about to do was rash, to say the least. Possibly even criminal. To go under false pretences to a home about which I knew nothing but evil was at least foolhardy.
    If I should either disappear like Miss Little, or end up in jail like my father, I would have no one to turn to. Who would believe the word of a prisoner’s daughter? The mistress of the house was a hussy, and the boy in my charge wore a strange, sly smile. On top of it all, Mr. Kirby had disappeared. He would he taken for a fabrication, an excuse by Papa to get into Glanbury Park and steal their diamonds.
    The countryside at least was pleasantly pastoral. The finer country homes appeared to date from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Many of them were timber framed, some with the elaborate parget fronts, fashioned in geometrical designs. We turned in at a set of black iron gates, drove through a small park, past a stand of firs, to my first glimpse of Glanbury.
    It was an old home, designed and built before Inigo Jones went to Italy and changed English architecture (for the better, in my own view). There was no Palladian symmetry in evidence. Glanbury was a large, rambling, climbing, sprawling, brick monstrosity of a place, the left side two stories higher than the right, and topped off with a tower. There was a foolish ornamental parapet on the roof of the lower half of the house. The doorway was too small, not even a double door, but only an oaken slab. Some Flemish strapwork was in evidence, as was the patterned brickwork of which my father often boasts. Windows were high and plentiful, hinting at a bright interior. The grounds were pretty. The sun striking the ornamental greenery around the building created a