“Has he seen her?”
“No. He would not, though Bootles asked him.”
“His own child—and she Miss Mignon!”
“All the better. She cannot endure him.”
“By Jove! But what a blow for Bootles!”
“How will he take it? Will it make any difference?”
“As wregards Miss Mignon? What wrot you talk. As if Bootles—” But there Lacy broke off in disgust, and the babel of surmises, questions, and answers went on.
And that night Gavor Gilchrist died.
CHAPTER IX.
Oh, but it was a blow for Bootles! To find he had been duped, tricked, made a fool of all this time; to remember the anxiety, the trouble, the expense to which he had been put; nay, to recall the chaff he had endured, and then to discover that Miss Mignon was Gilchrist’s child—the child of the man he went perhaps nearer to hating than any one he had ever known in all his life! Everything came back to him then—the dead man’s jibes and sneers and taunts, his unwearied efforts to tax him with an offence which he knew he had not committed. And though he had failed in that, oh, what a fool Gilchrist had made of him! That was the sting Bootles felt most of anything.