"You know where Mr. Dunbar has gone?" said Mr. Carter, looking still more sharply at the gentleman in the easy-chair.
"On the contrary, I was thinking of looking in upon him at the Abbey this evening."
"Humph!" murmured the detective, "then it's no use my asking you any questions on the subject?"
"None whatever. Henry Dunbar is gone away from the Abbey, you say? Why, I thought he was still under medical supervision—couldn't move off his sofa, except to take a turn upon a pair of crutches."
"I believe it was so, but he has disappeared notwithstanding."
"What do you mean by disappeared? He has gone away, I suppose, and he was free to go away, wasn't he?"
"Oh! of course; perfectly free."
"Then I don't so much wonder that he went," exclaimed the occupant of the cottage, stooping over the fire, and knocking the ashes out of his meerschaum. "He'd been tied by the leg long enough, poor devil! But how is it you're running about after him, as if he was a little boy that had bolted from his precious mother? You're not the surgeon who was attending him?"
"No, I'm employed by Lady Jocelyn; in fact, to tell you the honest truth," said the detective, with a simplicity of manner that was really charming: "to tell you the honest truth, I'm neither more nor less than a private detective, and I have come down from London direct to look after the missing gentleman. You see, Lady Jocelyn is afraid the long illness and fever, and all that sort of thing, may have had a very bad effect upon her poor father, and that he's a little bit touched in the upper story, perhaps;—and, upon my word," added the detective, frankly, "I think this sudden bolt looks very like it. In which case I fancy we may look for an attempt at suicide. What do you think, now, Major Vernon, as a friend of the missing gentleman, eh?"
The Major smiled.