"Ah-ha! she kept her family affairs to herself, did she?"
"It seems so. A mystery looms up at the very outset of the case. But of that hereafter."
"All right, the mystery can wait, if you say so. But with regard to her relatives, surely something is known about them. What have you been able to find out?"
"In the first place, I have ascertained that Mrs. Ernst had been in this country between thirty and forty years, coming from Germany; and that her financial manager, for a long time past, was Maier Zunder."
"She was a widow, I believe?"
"Yes, a good deal of a widow. She had been married three times, and her three husbands are dead."
"Indeed?"
"Yes; the first died in Germany."
"What was his name?"
"George Pfaff. After his death she came to the United States and met her second husband, Franz Natolph, in New York."