“I couldn’t quite tell you what happened. Miss Ermyn L’Estrange isn’t a lady altogether easy to understand when in an excited condition. Suffice it to say, she wouldn’t stay another hour, and went off with a noise like a catherine-wheel.”
“Quite so. But I say, Dibbin, can you give me the address of the lady?”
“With pleasure,” said the agent, in whom brandy and soda acted as a solvent. “I am a man, Mr. Harcourt, with three hundred and odd addresses in my head, I do assure you. But, then, Miss L’Estrange is a bird of passage—”
“All right, just write down the address that you know; and there is one other address that I want, Mr. Dibbin—that of the girl who acted as help to Miss Gwendoline Mordaunt.”
Dibbin had known this address also, and with the promise to see if he could find it among his papers—for it was he who had recommended the girl—went away. He was hardly gone when Harcourt, who did not let the grass grow under his feet, put on hat and coat, and started out to call upon Miss Ermyn L’Estrange.
CHAPTER V
VON OR VAN?
The address of Miss L’Estrange, given to David by Dibbin, was in King’s Road, Chelsea, and thither David set out, thinking in his cab of that word “papers,” of the oddness of Violet’s question at the grave: “What have you done with my sister’s papers?”