"Was there any reason why he should have gone away--any quarrel or that sort of thing?"
"Well," said the other man, "I rather think there was something of the sort. The boy's uncle--Captain Stewart--middle-aged, rather prim old party--you'll have met him, I dare say--he intimated to me one day that there had been some trivial row. You see, the lad isn't of age yet, though he is to be in a few months, and so he has had to live on an allowance doled out by his grandfather, who's the head of the house. The boy's father is dead. There's a quaint old beggar, if you like--the grandfather. He was rather a swell in the diplomatic, in his day, it seems--rather an important swell. Now he's bedridden. He sits all day in bed and plays cards with his granddaughter or with a very superior valet, and talks politics with the men who come to see him. Oh yes, he's a quaint old beggar. He has a great quantity of white hair and an enormous square white beard and the fiercest eyes I ever saw, I should think. Everybody's frightened out of their wits of him. Well, he sits up there and rules his family in good old patriarchal style, and it seems he came down a bit hard on the poor boy one day over some folly or other, and there was a row and the boy went out of the house swearing he'd be even."
"Ah, well, then," said Ste. Marie, "the matter seems simple enough. A foolish boy's foolish pique. He is staying in hiding somewhere to frighten his grandfather. When he thinks the time favorable he will come back and be wept over and forgiven."
The other man walked a little way in silence.
"Ye-es," he said, at last. "Yes, possibly. Possibly you are right. That's what the grandfather thinks. It's the obvious solution. Unfortunately there is more or less against it. The boy went away with--so far as can be learned--almost no money, almost none at all. And he has already been gone a month. Miss Benham, his sister, is sure that something has happened to him, and I'm a bit inclined to think so, too. It's all very odd. I should think he might have been kidnapped but that no demand has been made for money."
"He was not," suggested Ste. Marie--"not the sort of young man to do anything desperate--make away with himself?" Hartley laughed.
"Oh, Lord, no!" said he. "Not that sort of young man at all. He was a very normal type of rich and spoiled and somewhat foolish American boy."
"Rich?" inquired the other, quickly.
"Oh yes; they're beastly rich. Young Arthur is to come into something very good at his majority, I believe, from his father's estate, and the old grandfather is said to be indecently rich--rolling in it! There's another reason why the young idiot wouldn't be likely to stop away of his own accord. He wouldn't risk anything like a serious break with the old gentleman. It would mean a loss of millions to him, I dare say, for the old beggar is quite capable of cutting him off if he takes the notion. Oh, it's a bad business all through."
And after they had gone on a bit he said it again, shaking his head: