“What the—what do you know about Rigid?”
“I was at Newnham, in my young days,” she replied, “and I read mathematics. And, oddly enough, my private tutor was”—she hesitated for a second—“someone of your name.”
He pushed his chair away from the table.
“That must have been my father.”
“John Baltazar.”
“Yes, John Baltazar. One of the greatest mathematical geniuses Cambridge has produced. Good Lord! did you know my father?”
“He and I were great friends.”
She looked him through and through with curiously burning eyes; of which the boy was unconscious, for he said:
“Fancy your reading with my father! It’s a funny old world.” Then suddenly he reflected and glanced at her critically. “But how could you? He disappeared nearly twenty years ago.”
“I’m thirty-eight,” she said.