"Not I."
"And--you don't know what his business here may be."
"Not at all. Can't guess at it. It concerns neither you nor me, Sir Karl, and therefore I have not scrupled to tell you so much. Of course you will not repeat it again. If he chooses to remain unknown here, and pass himself off for a student of divinity--doubtless for sufficient reasons--I should not be justified in proclaiming that he is a London detective, and so possibly ruin his game."
Sir Karl made a motion of acquiescence. His brain was whirling in no measured degree. He connected the presence of this detective at Foxwood with the paragraph that had appeared in the newspaper touching the escaped convict from Portland Island.
"Would there--would there be any possibility of getting to know his business?" he dreamily asked.
"Not the slightest, I should say, unless he chooses directly to disclose it. Why? You cannot have any interest in it, I presume, Sir Karl, whatever it may be."
"No, no; certainly not," replied Sir Karl, awaking to the fact that he was on dangerous ground. "One is apt to get curious on hearing of business connected with detectives," he added, laughing; "as interested as one does in a good novel."
"Ay, true," said the lawyer, unsuspiciously.
"At Mrs. Jinks's he is lodging, is he?" absently remarked Karl, turning to depart; and inwardly marvelling how he could have caught up the notion that the person there was only a lad, a pupil of Cattacomb's.
"At Mrs. Jinks's, Sir Karl; got her drawing-room. Wonder how the Rev. Guy would feel if he knew the man over his head was a cute detective officer?"