Wilton gazed upon him with distended orbs, and then gave utterance to a wild laugh of incredulity.
“Preposterous!” he exclaimed.
“Unquestionably,” remarked Mires; “but it yet is the fact.”
Old Wilton pressed his hands to his temples, and tried to look back upon the past. The effort helped him to no solution of the enigma. That his daughter should have fallen in love with the goldsmith’s apprentice seemed incredible; but when he came to remember that he had saved her life, had been able to pay her many most acceptable attentions when she was in misery and distress, he began to believe that there might be something in it after all.
He staggered rather than walked to his seat, and, pressing his hands again over his brow, once more went over the scenes in which, under his eye, they had taken part together. There was not enough to satisfy him yet that the Colonel’s assertion could be true.
He turned sharply to him.
“Pray inform me, Colonel,” he said, “how you came to alight upon this discovery?”
The Colonel shrugged his shoulders.
“I had a shrewd notion of it from the first,” he returned. “I observed his conduct when visiting you at the Regent’s Park. I detected his artful duplicity immediately after I had been, as your guest, called upon to endure his company. I noticed his obsequious deference to you, his readiness to coincide with your views, and to assent, without reflection, to all you said.”
“I did not observe that,” remarked Wilton, thoughtfully.