"She does not appeal to me as many less gifted women do. Perhaps I am secretly jealous of the extreme fondness Gwendolen has always shown for her. If so, the fault is in me, not in her."
What I said in reply is not germane to this story.
After being assured by a few more discreet inquiries in some other perfectly safe quarters that Miss Graham's opinion of Mr. Rathbone was shared by those who best knew him, I returned to the one spot most likely to afford me a clue to, if no explanation of, this elusive mystery.
What did I propose to myself? First, to revisit Mrs. Carew and make the acquaintance of the boy Harry. I no longer doubted his being just what she called him, but she had asked me to call for this purpose and I had no excuse for declining the invitation, even if I had desired to do so. Afterward—but first let us finish with Mrs. Carew.
As she entered her reception-room that morning she looked so bright—that is, with the instinctive brightness of a naturally vivacious temperament—that I wondered if I had been mistaken in my thought that she had had no sleep all that night, simply because many of the lights in her house had not been put out till morning. But an inspection of her face revealed lines of care, which only her smile could efface, and she was not quite ready for smiles, affable and gracious as she showed herself.
Her first words, just as I expected, were:
"There is nothing in the papers about the child in the wagon."
"No; everything does not get into the papers."
"Will what we saw and what we found in the bungalow last night?"
"I hardly think so. That is our own special clue, Mrs. Carew—if it is a clue."