“You look prematurely old, sir—prematurely old,” said the General, severely. His spectacles were across his nose again by this time, and he was again looking Kester steadily in the face. And now he spoke in a voice that was low, stern, and impressive. “You look as if you had a burden on your mind: you look as if you had some secret care that was eating away your very life. Kester St. George, you are an unhappy man!”
Kester’s colour came and went. A shiver ran through him from head to foot. He pressed one hand for a moment across his eyes. Then he laughed, a forced, hollow laugh.
“Really, sir, you are rather hard on me,” he said. “After not seeing you for eight years, this is scarcely the greeting I anticipated from you. You have called me an unhappy man. Granting that I am one, am I any exception to the ordinary run of my fellow mortals? Show me the man who is really happy—who has no skeleton locked up in the secret closet of his heart!”
“Kester St. George, what have you done with your cousin, Lionel Dering?”
Kester started to his feet, his eyes staring, his hands trembling. A spasm that was gone almost before it had come, contorted his face for a moment strangely.
“Before heaven, General St. George, I don’t know what you are driving at!” he cried, in tones that were husky from excitement. “I am not my cousin’s keeper, that you should ask me what I have done with him.”
“Then it was not you who assisted him to escape from prison?”
“I! No—certainly not.”
“And yet I said it could be no one but you,” said the General, half sadly. “And you don’t know what has become of him? You cannot tell me where to find him now?”
“I have no more knowledge of my cousin’s whereabouts than you have, sir.”