“Then you can give me no more positive information?” he was saying.
“I’m sorry to say we can’t,” replied the lawyer. “The young lady left England more than four years ago—went to the Cape, I believe, as governess or companion, or something or other in that line. Since then we have heard nothing of her.”
“Do you think she is out there still?”
“My dear sir, it is impossible for us to say. I repeat that it was more than four years ago, and that we have not heard one word of her since.”
“Well, I am surprised that you, of all people, should be so blankly ignorant of her whereabouts, considering that it might be necessary to communi—” He checked himself hurriedly, seeing that he had let out too much. “I mean—that her friends might be making inquiries after her.”
The faintest possible smile lurked round the corners of the lawyer’s mouth. He fancied that the other had let down his guard in that incautious speech into which vexation had betrayed him. And it was even so.
“You are very interested in this lady’s whereabouts,” he said.
“Naturally. We are relations—distant relations, that is.”
“Indeed! How, may I ask?”
“Well, you know—hang it all, I’m a deuced bad hand at pedigrees and all that sort of thing, but we are, in a way, cousins, on the mother’s side,” replied Truscott, testily, in a sort of tone which resented the doubt thrown upon his statement by the other’s inquisitiveness.