interspersed with pipe, and to ‘look up the inevitable old Jack.’
Constance was then subjected to a cross-examination on all the circumstances of the detention at Ratzes, and all she had heard or ought to have heard about the arrival of the unwelcome little Michael, while her mother and sister drew their own inferences.
‘Really,’ said Ida at last, ‘it is just like a thing in a book.’
Constance was surprised.
‘Because it was such a happy surprise for them,’ she added hastily.
‘No, nonsense, child, but it is just what they always do when they want a supposititious heir.’
‘Ida, how can you say such things?’
‘But it is, Conny! There was the wicked Sir Ronald Macronald. He took his wife away to Belgrade, right in the Ukraine mountains, and it—’
‘Belgrade is in Hungary, and the Cossacks live in the Ukraine in Russia,’ suggested Constance.
‘Oh, never mind your school-girl geography, it was Bel something, an out-of-the-way place in the mountains anyway, and there he pretended she had a child, just out of malice to the right heiress, that lovely Lilian, and he got killed by a stag, and then she confessed on her death-bed. I declare it is just like—’