'Where the deuce or with whom does she reside?' he thought; 'but to find anyone you want, I don't know a more difficult place than this big village on Thames.'
The wrong person—like himself apparently—turning up at the wrong time is no new experience to anyone; but this intimacy of Finella and her cavalier seemed to be a daily matter, as Hammersley had seen them so often; and how often were they too probably together on occasions that he could know nothing of?
The germ of jealousy was now planted in his heart, and 'such germs by force of circumstances sometimes flourish and bear bitter fruit; at others, nothing assisting, they perish in the mind that gave them birth;' but a new force was given to the remarks of Villiers by some that Hammersley overheard the same evening in the same place—the 'Rag.'
There he suddenly recognised Finella's cavalier in full evening costume, eating his dinner alone in a corner of the great dining-room, and all unaware that he was sternly and closely scrutinized by one man, and the subject of conversation for other two, whose somewhat flippant remarks from behind a newspaper reached the ears of the former.
'Who is he, do you say? His face is new to me.'
'Ronald Garallan, of the Bengal Cavalry—a lucky dog.'
'How so?'
'Is going in for a good thing, I hear.'
'For what?'
'His cousin with no end of tin.'