He turned to her. “Your grandfather died when you were a child?” he asked.
“When I was two years of age, yes. He was by hobby a scientific man and a recluse, I believe, but he did considerable prospecting. My father was an only son, and, after the death of my grandmother, he insisted on father leaving the wilds. There followed a heated dispute which led my father to leave never to return. He seldom spoke of grandfather, and mother and I learned only the most fragmentary details of him and his life. Father died before I started to school and mother passed away a few years later, leaving me quite alone in the world, and had it not been for an invention of father’s, purchased on a royalty basis after his death by a manufacturing firm, I might also have been left quite penniless.”
“You never learned definitely just what happened your grandfather?”
“No. There were rumours reached us that he was killed by Indians in the bush and that rival prospectors had made away with him after he had discovered a gold mine. But none of these stories seemingly were ever confirmed.
“All my life I’ve wanted to learn about grandfather and what happened him,” she went on. “Though I had never known him it seemed as though he was very near to me—as if actually I had been in his dying thoughts. I had intended to explain all this to you that first night I went to your office, but—I was at first—afraid of you. Since then—”
“Yes?” he urged as she hesitated.
“Since I’ve felt instinctively you knew what I came to seek and you would find a way. I know now I could trust you.”
III
She looked up at him. His eyes did not meet hers and she was unprepared for the answer he gave her: “If you had asked sixty people, forty-nine who know me best would have told you you had better put your trust in Mephistopheles himself.”
She caught her breath. “But that—that is because they do not know you intimately.”