“I wonder,” she began almost eagerly, then started again quietly. “The man that built this house—the shop was built years earlier, they tell me—he was—I wonder if he was here in your day? His name was Richard Cartwright.”
“O yes, I knew Cartwright,” he returned not at all enthusiastically.
“You may not have heard—that he is dead?” she said softly.
“I understood he was. He came to a bad end, I believe?”
“A sad end,” she amended with a trace of indignation. “He was killed in a railway accident.”
“But he was himself a wreck long before that, I believe,” he remarked. “However, you, being a stranger, would not have heard I suppose. If you hadn’t come to live in his house, you would never have heard of him at all and then only because it is a crazy-built house.”
“It’s a charming house,” the girl declared.
“It is attractive to look at,” he agreed, peering through the dusk. “But—he is pretty well forgotten by this time, I dare say?”
“Well, if he is, it isn’t fair! It isn’t fair at all!” she cried.
He had nothing to say.