"You can, and my prayers will go with you; but you're not going in your present frame of mind towards me--that I tell you straight. You've had no breakfast, and it's lunch time. When you're dressed, suppose you come to my room and have something with me; I'll see that we're alone." "If you like, I'll come, but it will be on the understanding that you will not even try to persuade me not to do what I am going to do." "I won't try to persuade or dissuade you--only you come." When the countess was again in the pretty sitting-room which she called her very own she took a sheet of paper from between the buttons of her blouse: it was the sheet of paper which had been contained in the envelope which had been presented to the earl by the bronze figure on the pedestal. The little lady read it carefully through; then she struck a match, and lit it at the corner, holding it in her fingers while it flamed, and she asked herself: "I wonder who wrote it--could it have been Jane Simmons?" When the paper had been utterly consumed, dropping the ash on to the floor, she pressed it into the carpet with her shoe, so that none of it remained. Then she rang the bell. To the man who answered it she said: "There's a maid in the house named Simmons--Jane Simmons. Tell them to send her to me here at once." Some minutes elapsed, during which the countess, taking her ease on a couch covered with pink satin, opened, one after the other, a number of envelopes which were in a tray upon a table. For the most part just glancing at their enclosures, she dropped them from her on to the floor, and was still engaged in doing this when the man returned. "It appears, my lady, that Simmons has left the house." "Indeed?" The countess just glanced up from still another enclosure she was dropping to put the question; no one would have supposed she was interested in the least. "Yes, my lady. She was missed some time ago. Mrs. Ellis sent to her room, and it was found she was gone. It seems that one of the gardeners saw her walking towards the lake with a bag in her hand." "Is that so? Tell them to serve lunch in my room--lunch for two--in, say, half an hour." The man went. The lady continued to treat her correspondence with the same scant courtesy. "So she has gone. I thought it would be found that she had gone. She was seen walking towards the lake, with a bag. I wonder why the lake, and what was in the bag. Poor Vi!" CHAPTER XXIII The Latest Story