"What a perfectly intolerable letter!" said Gwen. "What does he mean by a newspaper scrap?... Oh, is that it?" She took from the old lady a printed cutting, and read it aloud. "Fancy his being that man," said she. "It made quite a talk last winter—was in all the papers." It was the paragraph Uncle Mo had come upon in the Star.
"I have seen that man," said Granny Marrable. And so sharp was Gwen in linking up clues, that she exclaimed at once:—"What—the madman? Dr. Nash told me of him. Didn't he come to hunt her up?"
"That was it, my lady. And he was all but caught. But I have never spoken of my meeting him, and she has barely spoken of him, till this letter came yesterday. And then we could speak of him together. But not Ruth. She was to know nothing. She was not here, by good luck, just the moment that it came."
"And my dear old Mrs. Picture? Oh, Granny—what a letter for her to get!"
"Indeed, my lady, she was very badly shaken by it. I would have been glad if I might have read it myself first, to tell her of it gently." Granny Marrable was entirely mistaken. "Break it gently," sounds so well! What is it worth in practice?
"Could she understand the letter. I couldn't, at first."
"She understood it better than I did. But it set her in a trembling, and then she got lost-like, and we thought it best to go for Dr. Nash.... No—Ruth never knew anything of the letter, not a word. And her mother said never a word to her. For he was her brother."
"I cannot understand some things in the letter now, but I see he is thoroughly vile. One thing is good, though! What he wants is money."
"Will that...?"
"Keep him quiet and out of the way? Yes—of course it will. Let me take the letter to show to my father. He will know what to do." She knew that her father's first thought might be to use the clue to catch the man, but she also knew he would not act upon it if his doing so was likely to shorten the span of life still left to old Maisie. "What was he like?" said she to Granny Marrable.