"Get the will proved and begin your search for Oliva Prédeaux. There is no such person. The girl's name you know, and I have told you where she is living. You'll find nobody who knows Oliva Prédeaux—her father disappeared when she was six—he's probably dead, and her stepmother brought her up without knowing her relationship to me—then she died and the girl has been working ever since she was fifteen."
"She is not to be found?"
"Until she is married. Watch her, Jim, spend all the money you wish—don't influence her unless you see she is getting the wrong kind of man...."
His voice, which had grown to something of the old strength, suddenly dropped and the great head rolled sideways on the pillow.
Kitson rose and crossed to the door. It opened upon a spacious sitting-room, through the big open windows of which could be seen the broad acres of the Sussex Weald.
A man was sitting in the window-seat, chin in hand, looking across to the chequered fields on the slope of the downs. He was a man of thirty, with a pointed beard, and he rose as the lawyer stepped quickly into the room.
"Anything wrong?" he asked.
"I think he has fainted—will you go to him, doctor?"
The young man passed swiftly and noiselessly to the bedside and made a brief examination. From a shelf near the head of the bed he took a hypodermic syringe and filled it from a small bottle. Baring the patient's side he slowly injected the drug. He stood for a moment looking down at the unconscious man, then came back to the big hall where James Kitson was waiting.
"Well?"