Mason’s eyes showed his interest. “He left his job rather suddenly?”
“Yes, without even going back to the office.”
“That,” Mason said noncommittally, “is rather peculiar.”
The woman came closer to him. Her hand rested on his wrist, and slowly the fingers tightened until the skin was white across her knuckles. “Belle,” she said, “suspected nothing. She’s a modern young woman, a strange mixture of sentiment and cynical acceptance of life. For more than a year she’d been wanting to take the name of Moar. She said that it was embarrassing to introduce her mother as Mrs. Moar and then explain that Carl was her stepfather. So when my husband said we’d take her name, she was overjoyed.”
“She gets along well with your husband?” Mason asked.
“She’s very, very fond of him,” the woman said. “Sometimes I think she understands him better than I do. Carl has always been something of an enigma to me. He’s undemonstrative and very self-contained. But he worships the ground Belle walks on. He never started complaining about any lack of opportunities in life until recently. Then he began to grumble. He couldn’t get enough money to give Belle a chance to meet the right sort of people. She didn’t have the clothes he thought she should have. She couldn’t travel...”
“You’re traveling now,” Mason observed with a smile.
“That’s just the point,” she said. “About two months ago we suddenly became affluent.”
“And that was when he changed his name?”
“Yes.”