"Foxes don't set the whole countryside in a clatter when they start moving; they're of much too retiring a nature. It's some one making off through the bushes, that's who it is. Hi! you there, who are you?"
There was no reply to his call.
"Perhaps it was some one who came upon us unexpectedly, and--and didn't wish to disturb us."
"Perhaps so; we're obliged to his taste for self-effacement if it is."
"I suppose you've no idea what was in the envelope."
"I've been putting two and two together, and I've formed a hypothesis which I'm convinced can't be very far out. Your father was not a man to say the thing which is not."
"I'm sure of it."
"I also; he did not say you would be a rich woman without cause. The hypothesis I've deduced is this. Your father was a gentleman of the old school; he didn't like commerce; he didn't wish people to think that he had anything to do with commerce; yet all the while he was drawing his income from a business with which he had probably been associated more or less unwillingly. At the time I saw him he was making arrangements to dispose of it; whether or not they were completed I cannot say; that envelope contains the clue. When he spoke of the suddenness of death he was possibly aware that he had a congenital predisposition towards the end which was actually his; and that envelope contained the secret--which he was even perilously anxious to preserve in life--of what was the source of his income, and of the fortune which he had built up for you."
"All this, of course, is surmise."
"You know it's more than surmise; you know that you're a rich woman, as you stand there."