"Of course I do."
"Did he dye his whiskers?"
"I won't answer you."
"Well, don't then. But this man under the umbrella here—you should have seen him—was your half-brother and my cousin. It makes us almost related."
Mary left the room. In a few minutes Mr. George came in.
"What's wrong with Mary?" he asked, suspiciously, angrily. Jack shrugged his shoulders, and pointed to the photograph. The old man bent over and stared at it: and laughed. Then he took the photograph out of the book, and put it in his pocket.
"Well, I'm damned!" he said. "Signs himself skull and cross-bones! Think of that now!"
"Was the Honourable George a smallish-built man?" asked Jack.
"Eh!" The old man started. Then startled, he began to remember back. "Ay!" he said. "He was. He was smallish-built, and the biggest little dude you ever set eyes on. Something about his backside always reminded me of a woman. But all the women were wild about him. Ay, even when he was over fifty, Mary's mother was wild in love with him. And he married her because she was going to be a big heiress. But she died a bit too soon, an' he got nothing, nor Mary neither, because she was his daughter." The old man made an ironic grimace. "He only died a few years back, in Sydney," he added. "But I say, that poor lass is fair cut up about it. We'd always kept it from her. I feel bad about her."
"She may as well get used to it," said Jack, disliking the old man's protective sentimentalism.