"I haven't an idea," he said. "I have never seen her. I have never heard of her. I never knew of her existence until that letter came this morning with her name signed at the end of it."
Mr. Haslitt started up. He crossed the room to his table and, fixing his folding glasses on the bridge of his nose, he bent over the letter.
"But she writes to you, Jim," he objected. "'Dear Mr. Frobisher,' she writes. She doesn't address the firm at all"; and he waited, looking at Jim, expecting him to withdraw this denial.
Jim, however, only shook his head.
"It's the most bewildering thing," he replied. "I can't make head or tail of it"; and Mr. Haslitt could not doubt now that he spoke the truth, so utterly and frankly baffled the young man was. "Why should Ann Upcott write to me? I have been asking myself that question for the last half-hour. And why didn't Betty Harlowe write to you, who have had her affairs in your care?"
"Ah!"
That last question helped Mr. Haslitt to an explanation. His face took a livelier expression.
"The answer to that is in Waberski's, the second letter. Betty—she snap her fingers at his awkwardnesses. She doesn't take the charge seriously. She will have left it to the French notary to dispose of it. Yes—I think that makes Ann Upcott's letter to you intelligible, too. The ceremonies of the Law in a foreign country would frighten a stranger, as this girl is apparently, more than they would Betty Harlowe, who has lived for four years in the midst of them. So she writes to the first name in the title of the firm, and writes to him as a man. That's it, Jim," and the old man rubbed his hands together in his satisfaction.
"A girl in terror wouldn't get any comfort out of writing to an abstraction. She wants to know that she's in touch with a real person. So she writes, 'Dear Mr. Frobisher.' That's it! You can take my word for it."
Mr. Haslitt walked back to his chair. But he did not sit down in it; he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out of the window over Frobisher's head.