‘It was for seven when you parted with it, then, Miss Hacket,’ said the manager; ‘let me ask whether you changed it yourself?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I sent it to—’ and there she came to a dead pause, in alarm.
‘Did you send it to Mr. Alfred Flinders?’ said Mr. Ellis.
‘Yes—oh!’ another little scream, ‘He can’t have done it. He can’t be such a villain! Your own uncle, Dolores.’
‘He is no uncle of Dolores Mohun!’ said the colonel. ‘He is only the son of her mother’s step-mother by her first marriage.’
‘Oh, Dolores, then you deceived me!’ exclaimed Constance; ‘you told me he was your own uncle, or I would never—and oh! my fifteen pounds. Where is he?’
‘That, madam,’ said Mr. Ellis, gravely, ‘I hope the police may discover. He has quitted Darminster after having cashed this cheque for seventy pounds. We have already telegraphed to the police to be on the look out for him, but I much fear that it will be too late.’
‘Oh! my fifteen pounds! What shall I do? Oh, Dolores, how could you? I shall never trust any one again!’
Perhaps Uncle Reginald felt the same, but he only darted a look upon his niece, which she felt in every nerve, though to his eyes she only stood hard and stolid. The manager, who found Constance’s torrent of words as hard to deal with as Dolores’s silence, asked for pen and ink, and begged to take down Miss Hacket’s statement to lay before a magistrate in case of Flinders’s apprehension. It was not very easy to keep her to the point, especially as her chief interest was in her own fifteen pounds, of which Mr. Ellis only would say that she could prosecute the man for obtaining money on false pretences, and this she trusted meant getting it back again. As to the cheque in question, she told how Dolores had entrusted it to her to send to her supposed uncle, Mr. Flinders, to whom it had been promised the day they went to Darminster, and she was quite ready to depose that when it left her hands, it was only for seven pounds.
This was all that the bank manager wanted. He thanked her, told Colonel Mohun they should hear from him, and went off in a hurry, both to communicate with the police, and to leave the young ladies to be dealt with by their friends, who, he might well suppose, would rather that he removed himself.