“You speak as if the prospect were anything but pleasing. If you object to the task, it will, perhaps, be all the better to get it done at once.”
“Where does she live?”
“She is staying with Lady Quaintree, in Lowndes Square.”
Paul Desfrayne recollected, with a queer feeling of surprise, that his mother had said the previous evening that Lady Quaintree had lent her the opera-box which she had used. Could it be possible that his mother already knew this girl?
“Lady Quaintree!” he repeated mechanically.
“Certainly. Miss Turquand has been living there for two or three years; she is her ladyship’s companion. If you have no other engagement of pressing importance, I fancy the most easy and agreeable way would be to call at the house this evening, about eight o’clock. Lady Quaintree is to have some sort of reception to-night, and, as I am almost one of the household, we could see her before the people begin to arrive.”
Paul Desfrayne gave way to fate. There was no help for it, so he was obliged to agree to this arrangement, or choose to think himself obliged, which was worse.
Frank Amberly thought that not many men would have received with such obvious repugnance the position of sole trustee to a beautiful girl of eighteen, who had just become entitled to a splendid fortune, especially when there were such provisions in his own favor.
“It is thus he receives what I would have given—what would I not have given?—to have obtained the trust,” he said mentally, with a keen pang of jealous envy.
It was a strange freak of Dame Fortune—who yet must surely be a spiteful old maid—to bring these two men, of all others, into such communication.