"I suppose," said the other man, "you mean the disappearance of Miss Benham's young brother, a month ago, before you returned to Paris. Yes, that was certainly very odd. That is, it was either very odd or very commonplace. And in either case the family is terribly cut up about it. The boy's name was Arthur Benham, and he was rather a young fool but not downright vicious, I should think. I never knew him at all well, but I know he spent his time chiefly at the Café de Paris and at the Olympia and at Longchamps and at Henry's Bar. Well, he just disappeared, that is all. He dropped completely out of sight between two days, and though the family has had a small army of detectives on his trail, they've not discovered the smallest clue. It's deuced odd altogether. You might think it easy to disappear like that but it's not."
"No—no," said Ste. Marie thoughtfully. "No, I should fancy not.
"This boy," he said after a pause, "I think I had seen him—had him pointed out to me—before I went away. I think it was at Henry's Bar where all the young Americans go to drink strange beverages. I am quite sure I remember his face. A weak face but not quite bad."
And after another little pause he asked—
"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 favourable 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?"