"But you'd rather see Cecil! You'd better start now. It's on the cards that the Scarletts came part way with Kramm to wait for her news."
Whether they had done this or not, I don't know. But the effect on Terry of the suggestion was good. And certainly the pair did arrive almost before it seemed that Kramm's short legs could have carried her to Dun Moat.
They gloomed into my sitting room like a pair of funeral mutes.
"My servant tells me you have seen my son," the woman I had known as Lady Scarlett began.
"She has imagination!" I smiled.
"You mean to say you have not seen him?" blustered Fox-face Père.
"I say neither that I have nor that I haven't," I replied. "The little I know about the child inclines me to believe he wasn't too happy at home, so why——"
"Oh, you admit knowing something!" The woman caught me up like a dropped stitch in her knitting. "I believe you've got the child here. We can have you arrested for kidnapping. The police——"
I laughed. "Have the police ever seen the little lamb? If they have, they might doubt the force of his attraction on a woman of my type. And you have no proof. But I'll let the local police look under my bed and into my wardrobes, if you'll let them search the suite you occupy at Dun Moat on proof I can produce."
"What are you hinting at?" snapped the late Lord Scarlett. "Do you intimate that we've hidden our own child at home and come to you with some blackmailing scheme——"