“Well, I must be off now,” she said, after that formality was accomplished, and proceeded to gather her things together. “Thank you for the tea. But, I say, don’t you want to know a little more of the beauteous stranger who is the bearer of the good tidings? You don’t even know my name.”
“Oh yes, Miss Finner, I do know it,” Gimblet assured her. “You left a card in the hall; I saw it as I came in, but I should of course be delighted to know more of you than that.”
“Know then,” said Seraphina, speaking in high, clear tones and with an assumption of affectation, “know then that I am not what I seem. My name, indeed, is a disguise, for my father, worthy man, was a Fynner with a y, an obscure relation of the noble house of Fynner of Loch Fyne. Though honest, he was poor; and my beloved and beautiful mother came of a line as well connected and impecunious as his own. The marriage aroused the wrath of both families, and the head of my father’s house, proud and haughty earl that he was, would never be brought to acknowledge his unhappy cousins. I was educated in a convent, and, at the death of my parents, found myself at the age of sixteen alone, and without a penny in the world. Scorning to beg, I adopted the profession of the stage, chiefly with a view to supporting an aged and suffering relative, the aunt of my father’s cousin. Now you know all there is to know about the innocent and unfortunate daughter of a gallant gentleman, the scion of a proud, but noble race.”
Miss Finner tilted her nose skyward and drew herself up haughtily. Then, with a disconcerting suddenness, she winked at Gimblet, and burst into a peal of laughter.
“If you can’t detect something fishy in that story,” she cried, “you’re not the detective you’re cracked up to be! But I often say that piece about my family. A poor chap I used to know in my young days, when I was in the provinces, made it up for me. A poet, he called himself, and was always making up things; very pretty some of them were—if you like that sort of thing. It was him that thought of my name, and I’ve never regretted it really. But I never heard that he got anyone else to take any notice of his composings, poor fellow.” Miss Finner sighed and looked rather sadly out of the window. “He was a good sort,” she added reminiscently; “one of the best. I put that bit in myself about being educated in a convent,” she concluded, pulling at her gloves. “It’s the usual thing.”
With a white dog under one arm and a white cat under the other, Miss Seraphina Finner, of the Inanity, talked herself out into the hall, and, after an interval for the purpose of regaling Gimblet with an anecdote of her earlier struggles, finally talked herself through the door and out of the flat altogether.
Gimblet, returning to the little room and absently rearranging the displaced chairs and tables in their habitual order, found it more silent and lonely than before Seraphina had ever entered there, with her incessant chatter, her boisterous mirth, and her happy vulgarity. As he moved about the place, restoring to it the appearance of every-day tidiness, his mind was busy with the information she had brought and the question of his next move. He decided on it quickly as he was finishing his task, and only lingered to pull back the curtain and throw open the window, so that the odour of scent that Seraphina had bequeathed might have an opportunity of dispersing. This he did, and then taking his hat and a light overcoat, for the evening was chilly and the weather had turned afresh to rain, he went down to the street and hailed a taxi.