Cicely made a courteous and smiling rejoinder, but Rupert thought he could read, in the mutinous setting of her pretty lips, that she had small intention of allowing her little daughter to breathe the salubrious air of Burnbrooke.
"You are in town on business only, not for pleasure?" the little lady asked, taking a certain malicious delight in seeing Sir Arthur's start of horror.
"Pleasure? I here for pleasure? Heaven forbid. I have come on troublesome business. I am anxious about the news of my unfortunate brother-in-law and his wife, my poor, foolish sister. Ah! well you never knew her, did you?"
"No, never." Cicely shook her head, wildly trying to unearth from the depths of her mind, any fragments of knowledge she might ever have possessed about Sir Arthur's brother-in-law; but finding herself entirely at sea, gave up the attempt.
"Poor, misguided soul," the visitor went on, with a solemn shake of the head; "she would never listen to reason; never believe what I told her. My sisters—Ah! well, well, I must not trouble you with our family skeletons. I have come up to try and find out if I can where my brother-in-law is, and to avert worse scandals than already exist."
Cicely, still completely at sea as to the drift of his conversation, murmured something non-committal and sympathetic, and he continued speaking with unabated energy.
"I also have some business to do with Scotland Yard," he said importantly; "my wife has lost a piece of jewellery which she greatly values, and which I also value exceedingly. The loss is a very strange one; and, after serious deliberation, I have decided to put the case into the hands of the Scotland Yard officials."
"Have you had a burglary?"
"No, nothing of that kind at all. We can only account for the loss in one way. We were travelling home last week, after a visit, and at Liverpool station my wife's maid put her mistress's dressing bag into the carriage, she herself standing beside the door. One person was in the compartment, a quiet-looking young lady, so the maid describes her. We reached home. My wife discovered the loss of the jewel she so much values. It had been put into the bag at the last minute before we left our friends' house, as she had been showing it to a visitor. The bag, it is true, was unlocked, but the maid vows she did not leave the carriage door, and that the young person in the carriage seemed to be a lady. The fact remains that the pendant has vanished."
"A pendant, was it?" Cicely asked with interest.