"It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo measuredly, "with the bits of evidence I've told you of, and a few others, when the big stone chimney at Haargrond Plaats blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other bits of evidence were bits of a man—two men you might call him! And, by the Living Tinker, considerin' how he was mixed up with the rest of the rubbish, he might have been half a dozen instead of Bough Van Busch!"
"He had this upon him? He—wore it round his neck?" Saxham asked the question in a grating whisper, dropping the clenched hand that held the diamond-set miniature upon the arm of his chair.
"I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly, "when he had a neck to boast of." He added, as he got up to take his leave: "The thing has been carefully cleaned. The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked in one place, but otherwise it has come off wonderfully. Perhaps you'd hand it over to—anybody it belongs to? Hope I haven't mulled many professional appointments. Remember me to Mrs. Saxham. Thanks frightfully! So long!"
LXV
In the days that followed Saxham had a letter, written by a man with whom he had been fairly intimate at Gueldersdorp during the strenuous days of the Siege—a man who would undoubtedly not have lived to go through those days but for the Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent letter, written by an unsteady hand.
Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the waste-paper basket with a contemptuous shrug. But he had made a mental note of the address, and drove there that afternoon.
The Doctor's motor-brougham stopped at the door of the grimy stucco Clergy-House that is attached to St. Margaret's in Wendish Street, West. Saxham rang a loud bell, that sent iron echoes pealing down flagged passages, and brought a little bonneted woman in rusty black to answer the door and the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius Fraithorn was at home and able to receive a visitor?
The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry, and wore one eyebrow several inches higher than the other, shook her rusty crape-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as she informed Saxham in a husky voice strongly flavoured with cloves that Father Julius 'ad been in the Confessional all the morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the Ascension, and was quite wore out. If there was anything she could do, she inferred, with quite a third-hand air of clerical responsibility, she would be happy to oblige the gentleman.
"I shall be obliged by your conveying my card to Mr. Fraithorn. You see that I am a doctor," said Saxham, with unsmiling gravity, "and not an ordinary caller on business connected with religion."