‘I might have gone to the parish register in the first instance,’ he said, when they had left the undertaker’s, ‘but I thought we should get more information out of an old inhabitant, and so we have, for we’ve heard of this old lady in Russell Square.’
‘Yes, I remember spending a week at her house,’ said Laura. ‘How long ago it all seems! Like the memory of another life.’
‘Lor’, yes,’ said Sampson; ‘I remember when I was a little chap, at Dr. Prossford’s grammar school, playing chuck-farthing. I’ve often looked back and wondered to think that little chap, in a tight jacket and short trousers, was an early edition of me.’
‘You think the later editions have been improvements on that,’ said Laura, smiling.
She was able to smile now. A heavy load had been suddenly lifted from her mind. What infinite relief it was to know that her father had never been the pitiful trickster—the crawling pensioner upon a woman’s bounty—that she had been taught to think him. Her heart was full of gratitude to heaven for this discovery—so easily made, and yet of such immeasurable value.
‘Who can that man be?’ she asked herself. ‘He must have been a friend of my father’s, in close companionship with him, or he would hardly have become possessed of my mother’s miniature, and of those letters and papers.’
She determined to go without delay to the house in Russell Square, in the hope—at best but a faint hope—of finding the old lady in black satin still among the living, and not represented by an entry in the ledger of some West-end undertaking firm, or by a number in the dismal catalogue of a suburban cemetery.
CHAPTER XLIII.
AN OLD LADY’S DIARY.
On the following afternoon Laura drove straight from the House of Detention to Russell Square. Her interview with her husband had been full of comfort. Mr. Leopold had been with his client, and Mr. Leopold was in excellent spirits. He had no doubt as to the issue of his case, even without Desrolles; and the detectives had very little doubt of finding Desrolles.