His dark face was purple-brown with the exertion of stooping as he rose up. Lady Hannah answered:
"The Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp has an orphan ward, a singularly lovely girl of nineteen or twenty, whose surname is Mildare. And it struck me just now—I don't know why now, and never before—that she might be——"
"Bough never said nothing to me about any girl. What like is this one?" Van Busch twisted the ring about his little finger, and spoke with a more sluggish lisp and slurring of the consonants than even was usual with him. "Is she short and square, with black hair and round blue eyes, and red cheeks and thick ankles?"
Lady Hannah, despite all her recently-gained experience of Van Busch, had not yet mastered his method of eliciting information.
"Miss Mildare is absolutely the opposite of your description," she declared. "She is quite tall, and very slight and pale, with slender hands and feet, and reddish-bronze hair, and eyes the colour of yellow topaz or old honey, with wonderful black lashes.... I have never seen anything to compare——" She stopped.
What strange eyes the man had, full of lines radiating from the pin-point pupils, scintillating like a snake's.... He said, in his thick, lisping way:
"A beauty, eh? And how long might the nuns have had her?"
"The Mayor's wife told me she has been under the care of the Convent ladies for some seven years."
His brown full face looked solid, and his eyes veiled themselves behind a glassy film. He was thinking, as he said:
"And her name is Mildare, eh? And you know her?"