He told himself that he ought to know it, for it was a familiar face, a face that spoke to him out of the long ago; but he could not place it in the record of his professional experiences. He took the photo out of the case, and looked at the back, where he found what he expected. There is always something written upon that kind of photograph by that kind of woman.
"San Remo,
"Poor old Tony. November 22th, '88."
The 22th, the uneducated penmanship sprawling over the little card, alike indicated the style of the writer.
"Poor old Tony!" mused Faunce, slowly puffing his last cigarette, with the midget stuck up in front of him, between the two candles. "Who is Tony? A swell, by the cut of his clothes, and that—well, the good-bred ones have an air of their own, an air that one can no more deny than one can describe it. Poor old Tony! At San Remo—condemned by the doctors. There's death in every line of the face and figure. A consumptive, most likely. The last sentence has been passed on you, poor beggar! Poor old Tony! And that woman was with you at San Remo, the companion of a doomed man, dying by inches. And she must have been in the flower of her beauty then, a splendid creature. Was she very fond of you, I wonder, honestly, sincerely attached to you? I think she was, for her hand trembled when she wrote those words! Poor old Tony! And there is a smudge across the date, that might indicate a tear. Well, if I fail in running her to earth in London, I could trace some part of her past life at San Remo, and get at her that way. But who was Tony? I'm positive I know the face. Perhaps the reflex action of the brain will help me," concluded Faunce.
The reflex action did nothing for Mr. Faunce, in the profound slumber which followed upon the fatigue of a long journey. No suggestion as to the original of the photograph had occurred to him when he put it in his letter-case next morning. It was hours afterwards, when he was lying in his berth in the steamer, "rocked in the cradle of the deep," wakeful, but with his brain in an idle, unoccupied state, that Tony's identity flashed upon him.
"Sir Hubert Withernsea," he said to himself, sitting up in his berth, and clapping his hand upon his forehead. "That's the man! I remember him about town ten years ago—a Yorkshire baronet with large estates in the West Riding—a weak-kneed youth with a passion for the Fancy, always heard of at prize-fights, and entertaining fighting men, putting up money for private glove-fights; a poor creature, born to be the prey of swindlers and loose women."
Faunce looked back to that period of ten years ago, which seemed strangely remote, more by reason of the changes in ideas and fashions, whim and folly, than by the lapse of time. He searched his mind for the name of any one woman in particular with whom Sir Hubert Withernsea had been associated, but here memory failed him. He had never had business relations with the young man, and though his ears were always open to the gossip of the town, he kept no record of trivial things outside the affairs of his clients. One young fool more or less travelling along the primrose path made no impression upon him. But with the knowledge of this former episode in the pseudo-Mrs. Randall's career, it ought to be easy for him to find out all about her in London, that focus of the world's intelligence, where he almost invariably searched for information before drawing any foreign capital.
CHAPTER IX.
"What begins now?"
"Happiness
Such as the world contains not."