She shook her head.
“No, I do not,” she said. “I have never heard the name.”
“You have no relations or friends in France?”
“None,” she replied immediately.
“What made you go to France at all?” he asked. “When I heard from you, Mary, you talked about taking a holiday in Madeira before setting up house in Bath, and the first thing I knew of your intention to go abroad again was the letter you sent me just before I started for Madeira.”
“I wanted to go a year ago, after Sir John’s death,” she said; “then Mrs. Renfrew couldn’t take the trip—one of her younger children had measles.”
“Has that woman children?” asked Timothy in an awed voice.
“Don’t be absurd. Of course she has children. It was she who decided on making the trip. She writes little articles in the Bath County Herald—a local paper—on the care of children and all that sort of thing. She’s not really a journalist, she is literary.”
“I know,” said Timothy, “sometimes they write poetry, sometimes recipes for ice cream—‘take three cups of flour, a pint of cream in which an egg has been boiled and a pinch of vanilla’——”
The girl smiled. Evidently Timothy had hit upon the particular brand of journalism to which Mrs. Renfrew was addicted.