Less than that time had been required for the trip, and now the millionaire stepped out of the car and approached the house, looking about him rather critically as he did so.
He had not always been wealthy, and he knew that No. 31 Floral Avenue, though insignificant enough from his present standpoint, was not the sort of place that a man dependent on the salary of the size of John Simpson’s was able to afford. Accordingly, therefore, he came to the same conclusion that Jack Cray had reached the previous day.
“By Heaven!” he muttered, the skin under his jaws tightening. “The fellow must have been helping himself from the fund before he decamped. What a fool he is! What fools they always are to make a big showing on nothing. Don’t they know what a telltale performance it is?” Then he smiled a little grimly and shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose, though, it’s natural that they should want to find some outlet for the money they’ve sold their souls for,” he added mentally, as he pressed the button of the electric bell.
The maid presently opened the door, and Griswold gave his name. He was ushered into the same room in which Cray had been conducted less than twenty-four hours before, and in hardly more than a minute Mrs. Simpson joined him.
Griswold looked at her with a touch of curiosity, for to him the members of his staff had always been little more than the cogs in the great machine that he drove, and it was rather hard for him to think of them in any intimately human relationship.
As soon as their first formal greetings were over, he came to the point at once.
“I’m very much interested—after a fashion—in this man Jones, Mrs. Simpson. Are you sure you made no mistake in the name?”
“Quite, Mr. Griswold,” the missing treasurer’s wife replied positively. “That’s certainly the name he gave me yesterday. He said you had sent him, too. He asked me all sorts of questions about Mr. Simpson and the house and myself—very strange questions, some of them. He even requested me to show him about the place. I do hope——”
Lane Griswold held up one carefully manicured hand.
“It’s all right, I think, Mrs. Simpson,” he hastened to assure her. “If he’s the man I think he is, he was quite justified in saying I sent him. Apparently, however, he didn’t choose to give his own name, which seems to have been a rather useless and unlooked-for performance. Describe him, please.”