"Didn't Mr. Brokenshire attack his interests—railways and steel and things—and nearly ruin him?"
"I believe there was some such talk."
I admired the way in which he refused to lend himself to the spread of the legend; but I insisted on going on, because the idea of this conflict of modern giants, with a beautiful maiden as the prize, appealed to my imagination.
"And didn't old Mrs. Billing shift round all of a sudden from the man who seemed to be going under to—?"
He cut the subject short by giving it another twist.
"Grainger's been unlucky. His whole family have been unlucky. It's an instance of tragedy haunting a race such as one reads of in mythology and now and then in modern history—the house of Atreus, for example, and the Stuarts, and the Hapsburgs, and so on."
I questioned him as to this, only to learn of a series of accidents, suicides, and sudden deaths, leaving Stacy as the last of his line, lonely and picturesque.
At the foot of the steps leading up to the Rossiter lawn Larry Strangways paused again. The children and dogs having preceded us and being safe on their own grounds, we could consider them off our minds.
"What do you know about old books?" he asked, suddenly.
The question took me so much by surprise that I could only say: