She nodded.
“I have just been to the police station,” she said. “It is his watch—the one I gave him—and his pocket book, with a half-written letter to me in it. They have shown me his photograph. It is my brother, Stephen Berdenstein. He was the only relative I had left in the world.”
I was really shocked, and I looked at her pitifully. “I am so sorry,” I said. “It must be terrible for you.”
She commenced to sob again, and I feared she would have hysterics. She was evidently very nervous, and very much overwrought. I was never particularly good at administering consolation, and I could think of nothing better to do than to ring the bell and order some tea.
“He was to have joined me in Paris on Saturday,” she continued after a minute or two. “He did not come and he sent a message. When Monday morning came and there was no letter from him, I felt sure that something had happened. I bought the English papers, and by chance I read about the murder. It seemed absurd to connect it with Stephen, especially as he told me he was going to be in London, but the description was so like him that I could not rest. I telegraphed to his bankers, and they replied that he had gone down into the country, but had left no address. So I crossed at once, and when I found that he had not been heard of at his club in London or anywhere else for more than ten days, I came down here. I went straight to the police station, and—and——”
She burst into tears again. I came over to her side and tried my best to be sympathetic. I am afraid that it was not a very successful attempt, for my thoughts were wholly engrossed in another direction. However, I murmured a few platitudes, and presently she became more coherent. She even accepted some tea, and bathed her face with some eau de Cologne, which I fetched from my room.
“Have you any idea,” I asked her presently, “why your brother came to this part of the country at all. He was staying at Lady Naselton’s, was he not? Was she an old friend?”
She shook her head.
“I never heard him speak of her in my life. He wrote me of a young Mr. Naselton who had visited him in Rio, but even in his last letter from Southampton he did not say a word about visiting them. He would have come straight to me, he said, but for a little urgent business in London.”