"Are you sure of what you say, mother?"
"Of course I am. Look up any old file of newspapers and you'll read all about the matter. It's old history now. But I really won't talk any more of these things, Cuthbert. If I do, there will be no sleep for me to-night. Oh dear me, such nerves as I have."
"Did you ever see Miss Saul, mother?"
"I told you I did on the platform. She was a fine, large, big girl, with a hook nose and big black eyes. Rather like Selina and Isabella, for I'm sure they have Jewish blood in their veins. Miss Saul—if that was her real name—might have passed as a relative of those horrid Loach girls."
"Mrs. Octagon and her sister who died are certainly much alike."
"Of course they are, and if Miss Saul had lived they would have been a kind of triplets. I hate that style of beauty myself," said Mrs. Mallow, who was slim and fair, "so coarse. Everyone called those Loach girls pretty, but I never did myself. I never liked them, and I won't call on Mrs. Octagon—such a vulgar name—if you marry fifty of her wretched daughters, Cuthbert."
"Don't say that, mother. Juliet is an angel!"
"Then she can't be her mother's daughter," said Mrs. Mallow obscurely, and finished the discussion in what she considered to be a triumphant manner. Nor would she renew it, though her son tried to learn more about the Loach and Saul families. However, he was satisfied with the knowledge he had acquired.
While returning next day to London, he had ample time to think over what he had been told. Miss Selina Loach had certainly shut herself up for many years in Rose Cottage, and it seemed as though she was afraid of being hurt in some way. Perhaps she even anticipated a violent death. And then Mrs. Octagon hinted that she knew who had killed her sister. It might not have been Caranby after all, whom she meant, but one of the Saul family, as Mrs. Mallow suggested.
"I wonder if it is as my mother thinks," mused Cuthbert, staring out of the window at the panorama of the landscape moving swiftly past. "Perhaps Selina did kill Miss Saul, and shut herself up to avoid being murdered by one of the relatives. Caranby said that Selina did not go to the inquest, but pretended she was ill. Then she and her sister went to the continent for two years, and finally, when they returned, Selina instead of taking her proper place in society as Isabella did, shut herself up as a recluse in Rose Cottage. The Saul family appear to have been a bad lot. I should like to look up that coining case. I wonder if I dare tell Jennings."