His darling sin

by M. E. Braddon

"He always said I was," she answered, with a sigh.

"Colonel Rannock? He knew and admired you before he ever saw Lady Perivale, didn't he, now?" asked Faunce, who, for reasons of his own, was very anxious to make her talk of Rannock; but she answered curtly—

"Whether he did or whether he didn't, it's no business of yours."

The gloomy look had come back to her face; and Faunce was more and more convinced that, whatever her anxiety was, it was in some way connected with Colonel Rannock.

He had brought Rannock's name into the conversation whenever he could, and with an artful persistence, and the name had always a depressing influence. She spoke of him reluctantly, and she seldom spoke of him dry-eyed. Once she spoke of him in a past tense. It could be no common fate that had left such aching memories.

Without actually "shadowing" the lady during this interval, he had contrived to keep acquainted with her movements and associations, and he had discovered that almost her only visitor was the man whom he had seen on that first day—the man who had opened the door, glanced into the room, and hurried away at sight of a stranger. Even this person was not a frequent visitor, but he called at irregular hours, which indicated a friendly footing.

It had not taken Faunce very long to identify this person as an individual well-known to the patrons of the prize-ring—a pugilist called Bolisco, who had been one of Sir Hubert Withernsea's protégés, and had often sat at meat and drink in the very much mixed society in the Abbey Road. Bolisco had been at the zenith of his renown ten years ago, when Withernsea was burning that brief candle of his days which had guttered into the grave before he was thirty; but the pugilist's reputation had considerably declined since then. He had been beaten ignominiously in three or four public encounters, had seen his star go down before younger and steadier men, and was no longer good for anything better than a glove-fight at a second-rate tavern. One of those glove-fights had ended fatally for Bolisco's opponent; and there had been some among the lookers-on who accused him of brutal roughness towards a weaker man, which had resulted in death. No blame had attached to Bolisco in the opinion of the coroner's jury; but the patrons of the Fancy had given him the cold shoulder since that unlucky accident, which had happened more than a year ago.

In the course of that semi-shadowing Faunce had found out some details of Kate Delmaine's life during the last half-year. He found that she had occupied the shabby first-floor in Selburne Street since the beginning of March, that she had come there straight from "abroad," and that her trunks were covered with foreign labels—Ajaccio, Algiers, Marseilles, Paris, Calais. She had arrived with a great load of personal luggage, fine clothes, and other portable property, the greater part of which had been gradually made away with. She would go out in a cab with a large cardboard box, and come home half an hour afterwards on foot, having left box and contents at a pawnbroker's in the King's Road.

Betsy, the sixteen-year-old maid-of-all-work, from whom Faunce derived most of his information, had been a close observer of the first-floor lodger, and was pleased to impart her knowledge and her impressions to the amiable Faunce.

Mrs. Randall was very down-hearted, Betsy told him, and would sit and cry for the hour together. Did she drink? Well, only a brandy-and-soda now and then, but she used to stick a needle into her arm that made her sleepy, and she would lie on the sofa all the afternoon and evening sometimes, like a dead thing. The girl had heard her moan and groan in her sleep when she took her a cup of tea in the morning, and she would wake with a frightened look, and stare about her "wild-like," as if she didn't know where she was.