“Did she leave any children?”
“No, not by him.”
“But afterwards—do you know if there were children?”
“I can’t say that I do. She was living in Boulogne when I last heard of her, and somebody told me afterwards that she died there.”
“That’s vague. She may be living still.”
“I don’t think that’s likely. It’s more than ten years—ay, it’s nearer fifteen—since I heard of her death. She was not the kind of woman to hide her light under a bushel for a quarter of a century. If she were alive I feel sure we should have heard of her at Cheriton. Lord! how fond she was of the place, and how proud she was of her good looks and her old name, and how haughty and overbearing she was with every other young woman that ever came in her way.”
“She must have been a remarkably disagreeable young person, I take it.”
“Well, not altogether, sir. She had a taking way when she wasn’t in her tantrums, and she was very good to the poor people about Cheriton. They doated upon her. She never quarrelled with them. It was with her father she got on worst. Those two never could hit it off. They were too much alike. And at last, when she was close upon seventeen, and a regular clipper, things got so bad that the Squire packed off the governess at an hour’s warning. She was too young and silly to manage such a pupil as Miss Strangway, and it’s my belief she sided with her in all her mischief, and made things worse. He turned her out of doors neck and crop, and a week afterwards he took his daughter up to London and handed her over to an English lady, who kept a finishing school somewhere abroad, at a place called Losun.”
“At Lausanne, I think.”
“Yes, that was the name. She was to stay there for a year, and then she was to have another year’s schooling in Paris to finish her; but she never got to Paris, didn’t Miss Eva. She ran off from Lausanne with a lieutenant in a marching regiment, and her father never saw her face again. He had no money to give her if she had married ever so well, but he took a pride in striking her name out of his will all the same.”