"Nevertheless," observed the judge, addressing Mercia and ostentatiously disregarding me, "with your permission, I am going to take you away from your oasis. On my way to rejoin you, I met Sir Henry. He is anxious for a moment's conversation with you, and I promised to bring you back with me."
He offered his arm, and, after hesitating for the fraction of a second, Mercia got up gracefully from her chair and accepted it.
As she did so, she flashed one swift glance at me. "You must tell me the rest of your story later in the evening, Mr. Northcote," she said.
I bowed, and then stood there for a moment, looking after them, as the garrulous old gentleman, who obviously imagined that he had scored off me, conducted her triumphantly out of the conservatory.
They had certainly left me something to think about. That Mercia was living with the Tregattocks, under another name, was in itself a startling bit of information; while, taken in conjunction with the forged testimonial and its fraudulent confirmation, it began to throw light on several previously rather dark corners. And yet I fully believed her denial of any complicity in the Milford affair. Of course she had tried to shoot me, but, somehow or other, that seemed a very different sort of thing. Poisoning butlers was a branch of assassination with which I could not associate Mercia at all.
I began to wonder how she had got to know the Tregattocks. Lammersfield had said something about their having picked her up in South America, and this fitted in accurately enough with my suspicions of the other evening. Her own phrase, "the Satyr of Culebra," suddenly recurred to my mind, and I remembered that I had never hunted up the place on the map, as I had meant to. Tregattock, I knew, had been Minister in Bolivia for some years, so it was more than possible that he too was mixed up in my unknown and apparently very shady past.
Then there was Maurice, whom at present I was quite unable to fit into the picture. Mercia, had, for some reason or other, given me a pretty plain hint that that amiable young gentleman was not to be trusted—and, indeed, Northcote's words and my own instincts had already led me to a similar conclusion. And yet, if he was a cousin, and one whom Northcote had apparently always treated well, why on earth should he be mixed up with Mercia and those Dago friends of hers, who, probably for excellent reasons of their own, were so eager to finish my career? It was just possible that, as my nearest relation, he might have an eye on my ill-gotten gains; but one hesitated to accept quite such a damning theory even about Maurice.
I was still puzzling my brains over all these infernal complications when a quick step sounded on the tessellated pavement, and, looking up, I saw Lord Sangatte coming briskly towards me.
"Good!" he said. "I thought I might find you here. Come along into the study."
To tell the truth, in the excitement of meeting Mercia, I had forgotten all about the appointment he had made, and his running across me in this opportune fashion was just a stroke of luck. However, naturally enough, I didn't inform his lordship of this fact, but accompanied him across the conservatory towards a door on the farther side, which he opened with a small Yale key. I was certainly having a most entertaining evening.