"Not in its present stage of revelation," he agreed, with a little yawn.
"The funny old Englishman—you never saw him, did you?—Mr Cholderton—he knew her. He rather admired her too. He was there when she rushed in and—— Never mind! I was there too—such a guy! I had corkscrew curls, you know, and a very short frock, and very long—other things. Oh, those frills!—And I suppose I really was the ugliest child ever born. Old Cholderton hated me—he'd have liked to box my ears, I know. But I think he was a little in love with Mrs Fitzhubert. Oh, I've never asked for that 'Peerage!'"
Major Duplay had resigned himself to a patient endurance of inadequate hints. His wits were not equal to putting together the pieces or conducting a sort of "missing word," or missing link, exercise to a triumphant issue. In time he would know all—supposing, that is, that there were really anything to know. Meanwhile he was not curious about other people's affairs; he minded his own business. Keeping young occupied much of his time; and then there was always the question of how it might prove possible to supplement the half-pay to which his years of service in the Swiss Army entitled him; it was scanty, and but for his niece's hospitality really insufficient. He thought that he was a clever man, he had remained an honest man, and he saw no reason why Fortune should not some day make him a comfortable man; she had never done so yet, having sent him into the world as the fifth child of a Protestant pastor in a French-speaking canton, and never having given him so much as a well-
to-do relative (even Madame de Kries' villa was on a modest scale) until Mina married Adolf Zabriska and kept that gentleman's money although she had the misfortune to lose his company. His death seemed to Duplay at least no great calamity; that he had died childless did not appear to have disappointed Mina and was certainly no ground of complaint on her uncle's part.
Presumably Mr Sloyd's inquiries elicited satisfactory information; perhaps Mina was not hard to please. At all events, a week later she and the Major got out at Blentmouth station and found Sloyd himself waiting to drive with them to Merrion Lodge; he had insisted on seeing them installed; doubtless he was, as he put it, playing for the break again. He sat in the landau with his back to the horses and pointed out the features of interest on the road; his couple of days' stay in the neighborhood seemed to have made him an old inhabitant.
"Five hundred population five years ago," he observed, waving his hand over Blentmouth in patronizing encouragement. "Two thousand winter, three five summer months now—largely due to William Iver, Esquire, of Fairholme—we shall pass Fairholme directly—a wealthy gentleman who takes great interest in the development of the town."
It was all Greek to the Major, but he nodded politely. Mina was looking about her with keen eyes.
"That's Fairholme," Sloyd went on, as they came to a large and rather new house situated on the skirts of Blentmouth. "Observe the glass—those houses cost thousands of pounds—grows peaches all the year, they tell me. At this point, Madame Zabriska, we turn and pursue the road by the river." And so he ceased not to play guide-book till he landed them at the door of Merrion Lodge itself, after a slow crawl
of a quarter of a mile uphill. Below them in the valley lay the little Blent, sparkling in the sunshine of a summer afternoon, and beyond the river, facing them on the opposite bank, no more perhaps than five hundred yards away, was Blent Hall. Mina ran to the parapet of the levelled terrace on which the Lodge stood, and looked down. Blent Hall made three sides of a square of old red-brick masonry, with a tower in the centre; it faced the river, and broad gravel-walks and broader lawns of level close-shaven turf ran down to the water's edge.
"Among the minor seats of the nobility Blent is considered a very perfect example," she heard Sloyd say to the Major, who was unobtrusively but steadily urging him in the direction of the landau. She turned to bid him good-by, and he came up to her, hat in hand.