"Oh, no," she said eagerly. "Everybody knows the story. He disappeared, and so did the money. I heard all the particulars at the time, because my room-mate at Havergal was the sister of the girl they said he did it for. She wasn't to blame, poor thing. She proved that she had sent him about his business before it happened. She married a millionaire afterward. She's had heaps of trouble."
Jack's horse fretted and danced, and no answer was required of him.
"Fancy your meeting him," she said excitingly. "Do tell me about him. They said he was terribly good-looking. Was he?"
"Don't ask me," said Jack gruffly. "I'm no judge of a man's looks." He scarcely knew what he was saying. The terrible word rang in his head with a clangour as of blows on naked iron. "Absconder!"
"Do tell me about him," she repeated. "Criminals are so deadly interesting! When they're gentlemen. I mean. And he was so young!"
"You said everybody knows what he did," said Jack dully. "I never heard of it."
"I meant everybody in our world," she said. "It never got in the newspapers of course. Malcolm Piers's uncle was a director in the bank, and he made the shortage good. He died a year or so afterward, leaving everything to a hospital. If Malcolm Piers had only waited a little while he wouldn't have had to steal the money."
"Then he would have been a millionaire, too," said Jack, with a start of harsh laughter.
She didn't understand the allusion. She favoured him with a sharp glance. "Funny he should have told you his real name."
"Why not?" said Jack abstractedly. "He didn't consider that he had done any wrong!"