She sprang to her feet quickly and greeted me in eagerness when the man announced me.
“Then you are back again, Mr Greenwood,” she cried. “Oh, I’m so very glad. I’ve been wondering and wondering that I had heard no news of you. Where have you been?”
“In Italy,” I answered, throwing off my overcoat at her suggestion, and taking a low chair near her. “I have been making inquiries.”
“And what have you discovered?”
“Several facts which tend rather to increase the mystery surrounding your poor father than to elucidate it.”
I saw that her face was paler than it had been when I left London, and that she seemed unnerved and strangely anxious. I asked her why she had not gone to Brighton or to some other place on the south coast as I had suggested, but she replied that she preferred to remain at home, and that in truth she had been anxiously awaiting my return.
I explained to her in brief what I had discovered in Italy: of my meeting with the Capuchin brother and of our curious conversation.
“I never heard my father speak of him,” she said. “What kind of man is he?”
I described him as best I could, and told her how I had met him at dinner there, in their house, during her absence with Mrs Percival in Scotland.
“I thought that a monk, having once entered an Order, could not re-assume the ordinary garments of secular life,” she remarked.