‘In France,’ said Lady William, ‘there is such a thing as a faire part. They don’t exist in England, I suppose?’
‘They are hideous things in France,’ said Leo, with a shiver, ‘when you get a letter black to your elbow with a long string of names which you don’t know, till you come to one little one at the end——’
‘They are better, however, than no information at all.’
‘Oh, I hope you will not think there was any incivility meant. I myself heard my mother say that you must be informed. There was a search through all the address books, but we could not find at first where you lived. And then I volunteered——’
‘To come here, of all places in the world—next door to my cottage! How extraordinarily acute your flair must be, my dear Lord Will!’
‘It’s not that,’ said the young man, very red. ‘I knew that Swinford knew you. He wrote to one of the girls, saying what a stun—I mean that you were in his neighbourhood, and about your daughter, and all that—— ’
‘Perhaps it was the first intimation you had of our existence,’ she said.
‘Oh, no—no; don’t think so. Besides, you are in the peerage; there can be no mistake about that.’
‘That is an honour I didn’t think of. And so your uncle John is dead? He was a very strange man—not like any of the family——’
‘Not at all like the rest of us. None of the others had ever two sixpences to rub against each other. He has died leaving a great fortune.’