“You went away alone in the Itala car before nine this morning and you came back scarcely an hour ago. What is the matter? Is there some new trouble? Jean, dear man, I am older than you; I have only you. What is it?”
Jean reached out for his tobacco pouch. “Hilaire,” he said very gravely, after a pause, which he occupied in filling his pipe. “You remember I asked you to do anything, anything, for a girl named Olive Agar. You have never heard from her or of her?”
“Ah,” he sighed, “I have been to Siena. There was some affair—early in September she came to Florence, to the Lorenzoni of all people in the world.”
Hilaire whistled.
“Yes, I know,” the younger man said gloomily, as though he had spoken. “That woman! What she must have suffered in these months! Well, she left them suddenly at the beginning of November.”
“Where is she now?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.”
“Why did she leave Siena?”
“There was some trouble—a bad business,” he answered reluctantly. “She lived with some cousins, and one of them committed suicide. She came away to escape the horror and all the talk, I suppose.”