The little spark of interest seemed to have entirely died out of her manner.
“I see,” she murmured. “The house certainly is a pleasant one. We scarcely expected, though, to see it let so soon.”
“Why not?”
“People have ideas. You know the story of the last tenant here?”
“I heard it after I had taken the house,” he confided.
She pointed to the library window on the ground floor.
“He was shot one night in the study there,” she told him.
“Terrible! And what seems more terrible still, I understand that the murderer was never caught. Surely some one must have been suspected.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders. She had accepted one of her companion’s cigarettes and was smoking lazily and with a certain measure of content.
“I think,” she said, “that every one in the village has been suspected, including Mr. Wilkinson the clergyman, myself, every one up at the Hall and all the servants. The hard thing, however, has always been to discover any possible motive.”