‘Jolly little place,’ said Haddon, as he moved me that afternoon to Geneva, whence, after a few days’ rest, we went on into the Alps of Haute Savoie, ‘and lucky the old body was so kind and quick. Odd, wasn’t it?’ He glanced at me.
Something in his voice betrayed he hid another thought. I saw nothing ‘odd’ in it at all, only very tiresome.
‘What’s its name?’ I asked, taking a shot at a venture.
He hesitated a second. Haddon, the climber, was not skilled in the delicacies of tact.
‘Don’t know its present name,’ he answered, looking away from me across the lake, ‘but it stands on the site of an old château—destroyed a hundred years ago—the Château de Bellerive.’
And then I understood my old friend’s absurd confusion. For Bellerive chanced also to be the name of a married woman I knew in Scotland—at least, it was her maiden name, and she was of French extraction.
THE END
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