"What! The photographer?"
"Yes, Mr. Donald, the photographer. Well, we married, and how many nice things they gave me—and they were not rich folk, either!"
"They? Who, Madame René?"
"Why, Mrs. Percival and the children—gowns and aprons and pretty things that any young wife might be proud to have. She had married a fine gentleman, but she had been a poor girl. Her little boy was named after his grandfather, and it made such a funny mixture,—James Wogg Percival; but we always called him Jamie."
"Wogg!" exclaimed Don. "I know a James Wogg—a London detective—"
"Oh, that's the son, sir, Mrs. Percival's brother; he's a detective, and a pretty sharp one, but not sharp enough for me."
She said this with such a confident little toss of her head that Don, much interested, asked what she meant.
"Why, you see, Mr. Wogg often came to see his sister, Mrs. Percival, as I think, to borrow money of her; and he was always telling of the wonderful things he did, and how nothing could escape him, and how stupidly other detectives did their work. And one day, when I was in the room, he actually told how some people were looking for one Ellen Lee, a nursemaid who had been saved from shipwreck, and how one of the survivors was moving heaven and earth to find her, but hadn't succeeded; and how, if the case had been given to him, he would have done thus and so—for she never could have escaped him. And there I was almost under his very nose!—yes, then and many a time after!"
"It's the funniest thing I ever heard!" cried Donald, enjoying the joke immensely, and convulsed to think of Mr. Wogg's disgust when he should learn these simple facts.
"Poor old Wogg!" he said. "It will almost kill him."