They entered the room, and Gerald threw himself into an easy-chair near the window. Hamel wheeled up another chair and produced a box of cigarettes.
“Queer thing your dropping across that fellow in the way you did,” he remarked. “Just shows how one may disappear from the world altogether, and no one be a bit the wiser.”
The boy was sitting with folded arms. His expression was one of deep gloom.
“I only wish I’d never brought him here,” he muttered. “I ought to have known better.”
Hamel raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t he as well off here as anywhere else?”
“Do you think that he is?” Gerald demanded, looking across at Hamel.
There was a brief silence.
“We can scarcely do your uncle the injustice,” Hamel remarked, “of imagining that he can possibly have any reason or any desire to deal with that man except as a guest.”
“Do you really believe that?” Gerald asked.
Hamel rose to his feet.