"Not one word. She was unusually taciturn—silent, in fact. She took the letters in silence, signed them in silence. No, on reflection, she never spoke a word while I was in the room. I took the letters away and began putting them in their envelopes. Soon afterwards Lady Riversreade came through my room and went out, and I saw her go across the grounds to the Court. She didn't turn up at the usual luncheon at the Home, and I didn't see her again that afternoon. In fact, I didn't see her again that day, for when I went home to the Court at five o'clock, Lady Riversreade's maid told me that her mistress had gone up to town and wouldn't be home until late that night. I went to bed before she returned."
"Next morning?" suggested Hetherwick.
"Next morning she was just as usual, and things went on in the usual way."
"Did she ever mention this man and his visit to you?" asked Hetherwick.
"No—not a word of him. But I found out something about him myself on Friday afternoon."
"What? Something relevant?"
"May be relevant to—something. I was wondering about him—and his printed card. I thought it odd that a medical man, so smartly dressed and all that, should present a card like that—not one well printed, a cheap thing! Besides, it had no address. I wondered—mere inquisitiveness, perhaps—where the creature came from. Now, we've a jolly good lot of the usual reference-books there at the Home—and there's a first-class right up-to-date medical directory amongst them. So I looked up the name of Dr. Cyprian Baseverie. I say, looked it up—but I didn't do that—for it wasn't there! He's neither an English, nor a Scottish, nor an Irish medical man."
"Foreigner, then," said Hetherwick. "French, perhaps, or—American."
"May be an Egyptian, or a Persian, or a Eurasian, for anything I know," remarked Rhona. "What I know is that he's not on the list in that directory, though from his speech and manner you'd think he'd been practising in the West End all his life! Anyway, that's the story. Is there anything in it?"
Hetherwick picked up his glass of claret by its stem and looked thoughtfully through the contents of the bowl.