Whymper saw the common sense of this proposal, but he said that nothing would induce him to ask such questions of Miss Averill. It was, therefore, agreed that French should call on her and make the inquiries.
Ruth was at home when French reached the Oxleys’, and she saw him at once. French apologised for troubling her so soon again, and then asked some questions as to the possible amount of petrol and paraffin which had been at Starvel on the night of the fire. From this he switched the conversation on to herself, and with a dexterity born of long practice led her to talk of her relatives. So deftly did he question her, that when in a few minutes he had discovered all he wished to know, she had not realised that she had been pumped.
In answer to his veiled suggestions she told him that her father’s name was Theodore Averill, that he had lived in Bayonne, where he had held a good appointment in the wine industry, and that he had married a French lady whom he had met at Biarritz. This lady, her mother, had died when she was born and her father had only survived her by about four years. On his death she had come to her uncle Simon, he being her only other relative. She was born in Bayonne and baptised, she believed, by the Anglican clergyman at Biarritz. Her father was a member of the Church of England and her mother a Huguenot.
“This,” French said when, half an hour later, he was back in the vestry room of the old church, “will lead us to certainty. I will send a wire to the Biarritz police and have the records looked up. Of course, I don’t doubt Miss Averill’s word for a moment, but it is just conceivable that she might have been misled as to her birth. However, we want to be absolutely sure.”
He wired that evening and it may be mentioned here that in the course of a couple of days he received the following information:—
1. Mr. Theodore Averill was a wine merchant and lived at Bayonne.
2. Mr. Averill and Mlle. Anne de Condillac had been married in the English church at Biarritz on the 24th of June, 1905.
3. Mrs. Averill had died on the 17th of July, 1906, while giving birth to a daughter.
4. This daughter, whose name was Ruth, was baptised at the Anglican church, Biarritz, on the 19th of August, 1906.
5. Mr. Theodore Averill had died on the 8th of September, 1910, his little four-year old daughter then being sent to England.