“What brought Miss Newton and you together?”
“That is rather a long story. I took some trouble to find the lady in order to settle one question which had disturbed my cousin Juanita since her husband’s death.”
“What question?”
“She was haunted by an idea that Sir Godfrey’s murderer was one of the Strangways, and his murder an act of vengeance by some member of that banished race. It was in order to set this question at rest for ever that I took some trouble to hunt out the history of Squire Strangway’s two sons and only daughter. I traced them all three to their graves, and have been able to convince Juanita that they and their troubles were at rest long before the time of her husband’s murder.”
“What could have put such a notion into her head?”
“Oh, it came naturally enough. It was only a development of Churton’s idea of a vendetta.”
“She was always full of fancies. Yes, I remember she used to say the house was haunted by the ghosts of the Strangways. I really think she had a dim idea that I had injured that spendthrift race in buying the estate which they had wasted. And so to satisfy Juanita you took the trouble to ferret out Miss Newton? Upon my word, Theodore, your conduct is more Quixotic than I could have believed of any young man in the nineteenth century. And pray by what means did you discover the ci-devant governess?”
Theodore told the story of his visit to the scholastic agencies, his journey to Westmorland, and his friendly reception by Miss Newton in her Lambeth lodgings.
“She was much attached to Miss Strangway, who was her first charge, and near enough to her own age to be more of a companion than a pupil,” he said, “and she spoke of her melancholy fate with great tenderness.”
“It was a melancholy fate, was it? I know she made a runaway-marriage; but in what way was her fate sadder than the common destiny of a spendthrift’s daughter—a girl who has been reared in extravagance and self-indulgence, and who finds herself face to face with penury in the bloom of her womanhood?”