“There is no young lady here,” said Miss Pursill with a hard look. “I know nothing about it. What is her name?”
“I have made a mistake, I am afraid.” Charles was instantly on his guard. “I am really very sorry—”
She was not altogether proof against the winning smile with which he tendered an apology, but she looked at him strangely as she accompanied him downstairs to the front door.
Charles went back to London with a dark and angry face. His anger was directed against Fate, which had arranged such a fantastic anticlimax for his cherished hopes. The blow was almost too much for him. He had deceived himself into thinking that he would find Sisily at Charleswood, and he felt that he had really lost her. He was now reduced to searching for her in the great wilderness of London, which seemed a hopeless task.
By the time the train reached Charing Cross he rallied from his fit of despondency. He refused to despair. Sisily was somewhere in London, at that moment walking alone among its countless hordes, perhaps thinking of him. He would find her—he must! Where to commence? She had reached Paddington only a few nights ago, so that was obviously the logical starting-point of any inquiries. To Paddington he went, this time in a taxi-cab.
He had an extraordinary initial piece of luck. Fortune, either regretting her previous treatment or tantalizing him in feminine fashion with the expectation of greater favours to come, threw him at the very outset of his inquiries against the red-headed luggage porter who had spoken with Sisily on her arrival from Penzance. The porter, leaning against the white enamelled walls of a Tube passage, pictured the scene with much loquacity, and a faithful recollection of his own share in the interview. Charles anxiously asked him if the young lady he had encountered was very pretty—pale and dark. The porter, with a judicial air, responded that looks in women was, after all, a matter of taste—what was one man’s meat was another man’s poison, as you might say—but this young lady had dark hair and eyes, and her face hadn’t too much colour in it, so far as he remembered. He apologized for this vagueness of description on the plea that one girl was very like another to a man who saw them in droves every day, as he did. But one or two minute particulars of her dress which he was able to supply convinced Charles that he had seen Sisily. The man added that as far as he knew the young lady went on to Euston Square, though he couldn’t say he’d actually seen her catch the train for there.
It was not until he had pocketed the half-crown Charles gave him that he added a piece of information of some importance.
“You’re not the first who’s been inquiring about this particular young lady,” he said. “There was somebody before you—let me see—Thursday it was. He came strolling along, affable as you please, and seemed to know all about it before he started. ‘That young lady who arrived by the Cornwall train on Tuesday night, porter, and asked you the way to Euston Square—what was she like?’ That took me back a bit, but I told him, just as I’ve told you. He asked me another question or two, and then went into the station-master’s office.”
“What was he like?”
“Not much older than yourself, in a brown suit, tall and thin, with sharpish features and quick smiling eyes.”