“I must own that I was engaged in the homely pursuit of peeling potatoes for our early dinner,” said she, as she showed him the old worn table-knife which she held in her carefully gloved hands.
Very careful she was, this dried-up little elderly lady, about the care of her person; she never went into the garden without a sunbonnet to preserve her complexion, nor did any sort of rough work without an old pair of gloves on her hands.
She led Clifford into the drawing-room, a long, pleasant apartment with a low ceiling, with an old-fashioned bow-window that looked to the west and another that looked to the south. The sunshine showed up the shabbiness of which Clifford had noted some traces the day before. The faded cushions, the rickety chairs, the bare fireplace, with nothing but a small sheet of brown paper in the grate to replace the winter’s fire, all spoke of desperate shifts, of the meanest straits of genteel poverty. But Miss Bostal gave him very little time to look about him.
“I can guess what you have come about,” she began, as she put down her old knife upon the side-table in the passage before entering the room. “It is about this dreadful thing that has happened at the Claris’s. But I must tell you frankly that if you have any suspicions of old Claris or his niece, it is of no use your talking to me, for you will get no sympathy. I have known old George Claris for nearly twelve years; and as for Nell, I don’t think I could care more for the girl if she were my own sister. She is as incapable of theft as an angel.”
The lady’s thin, pale face grew quite pink under the energy of this protest, which Clifford hastened to assure her was not needed.
“I believe that just as heartily as you do,” he said, earnestly. “I only want the mystery cleared up for their own sake; and I thought that you, who live so near, might, perhaps, have a notion which would help us to arrive at the truth.”
Miss Bostal smiled triumphantly.
“I have,” she said, emphatically. “I have a very strong notion, indeed. I will tell you in confidence whom I suspect, and I shall try my hardest to find out the truth.”
Clifford’s face glowed with excitement and expectancy.
“Who—who is it?” he asked, breathlessly.