"Have—Where have you been?" asked Mr. Dundas abruptly, with that sudden glance as suddenly withdrawn which tells of a half-formed suspicion neither dwelt on nor clearly made out.
"To Paris," said Mr. Gryce demurely. "I went to see—"
"Oh! you went to see Notre Dame and La Madeleine of course," interrupted Sebastian satirically.
"No," answered Mr. Gryce with a cherubic smile. "Strange to say, I had business connected with that odd drama of Le Sphinx."
There was not much more talk after this, and Mr. Gryce soon took his leave, desiring to be most respectfully remembered to Miss Dundas when her father next wrote, and to say that he was keeping some pretty specimens of moths for her on her return; both of which messages Sebastian promised to convey at the earliest opportunity, improvising a counter-remark of Leam's which he was sorry he could not remember accurately, but it was something about butterflies and Mr. Gryce, though what it was he could not positively say.
"Never mind: I will take the will for the deed," said the naturalist as he smiled himself through the doorway.
And when he had gone Josephine declared that she did not care if he never came again: there was something she did not like about him. Pushed for a reason by her husband, who always assumed a logical and masculine tone to her, she had not one to produce, but she stumbled as if by chance on the word "sinister," which was just what Mr. Gryce was not. So Sebastian made her go into the library for the dictionary and hunt up the word through all its derivations, and thus proved to her incontestably that she was ignorant of the English language and of human nature in about equal proportions.
It was soon remarked at the post-office that no letter addressed to Miss Dundas ever left North Aston, and that none came to Mr. Dundas or any one else in the queer, cramped handwriting which experience had taught Mrs. Pepper, post-mistress as well as the keeper of the village general shop, carried the sentiments of Leam Dundas. This caused a curious little buzz in the lower parts of the hive when Mrs. Pepper mentioned it to her friends and gossips; but as no fire can live without fresh fuel, and as nothing whatever was heard of Leam to stimulate curiosity or set new tales afloat, by degrees her name dropped out of the daily discussions of the place, and she was no longer interesting, because she had become used up and talked out.
Only, Mr. Gryce wrote more frequently than had been his wont to Miss Gryce at Windy Brow in Cumberland—conjectured to be his sister; and only, Alick never ceased in his attempts to discover where his lost queen was hidden, though these attempts had hitherto been hopelessly baffled, partly because he had not an inch of foothold whence to make his first spring, nor the thinnest clew to tell him which path to take.
And as a purchaser, the final cause of whose existence seemed to have been the unquestioning possession of Ford House, came suddenly on the scene and took the whole thing as it stood, Sebastian and his wife left the place, taking Fina with them, and migrated to Paris to finish their interrupted honeymoon. So now it was supposed that the last link connecting Leam with North Aston was broken, and that she was indeed blotted out and for ever.