I had thought him keen, yet he had paid no more attention to me than if I had been a stick. Was the corner in which I sat darker than I thought, or had he been so full of his own affairs that he failed to recognise me? I had kept my face turned away, but he assuredly must have known my figure.
When he was gone the two laid their heads together for a moment, then began to bustle towards me. In the meantime I had planned a coup d'etat. I had considered if, by a little acting on my part, I could put them in the wrong, I might succeed in getting from them some positive facts to work upon. Accordingly, I was in a state of suppressed feeling when the Captain found himself face to face with me.
"I heard you," said I, flinging down the book I had taken up. "I have ears like a hare and I couldn't help it. I know Mr. Gillespie, and it made my blood boil to hear him addressed with suspicion. How anyone who has ever heard him speak to the poor and unfortunate could associate him with the atrocious death of his father, I cannot imagine. So good to poor girls! So bountiful in his charities! I thought you were Christians here."
The Captain may have been a Christian, but he was also a man, and, being a man, looked nettled.
"It was a mistake for us to discuss Army affairs within reach of two such sharp ears," said he. "Mr. Gillespie has done some good work, and far be it from me to add myself to those who have associated his name with the crime which has just made the family notorious. I simply fail to stand by him because he uses us as a cloak for his personal indulgences. He is infatuated with a woman whom he has never presumed to present to his family. This won't do for us. The other matter belongs to the police."
I allowed myself to cool down a trifle.
"I beg your pardon; you know your own business, of course. But it's a little hard for me to believe that such a refined man as Mr. Gillespie could find any other than a charitable interest in any woman likely to come straying in here. Did you ever see his home, his child, his friends?"
The Captain shrugged his shoulders and curtly replied:
"I can imagine." Then in a tone calculated to end the interview so far as this topic was concerned: "We count nothing as strange in this place, sir. We come too near the unregenerate heart. Human nature's the same, sir, in rich and in poor. And now, sir, your business? It's most time for our noon meeting, so I must ask you to be concise."
I had almost forgotten I had any business there, but I pulled myself up under his eye and told him I was on the search for a woman, too.