He smiled.
“I wonder if they have quarrelled, or if——”
Suddenly his thoughts reverted to Cora; then to the contents of Blenkiron’s letter; then to the anonymous letter Cora had received, and finally once more to Alix Stothert.
“Of course,” he said reflectively, “that girl Stothert kissed so affectionately in the carriage drive may have been his daughter, and yet——”
“And he said the dog that growled sounded like a bulldog. La Planta has one, a brindle. I wish the dog at Stapleton’s house had been let out to pursue George, then he would have known its color!”
He smiled at the thought.
“But, after all,” his train of thought ran on, “why should La Planta’s dog have been in Stapleton’s house? Plenty of people own bulldogs; and for that matter it may not have been a bulldog.”
He had been singularly accurate in his conjecture that Charlie Preston was worried. Indeed he was more than worried. At the time of writing he had felt almost in despair at the extraordinary change that had suddenly come over Yootha. From the night of her great success at the tables she had become a slave to roulette. She played now with Jessica during the afternoons as well as at night, and not infrequently in the morning too. She could talk and think of nothing but roulette and petits chevaux. At the moment her ambition was to evolve a system by which she could never lose—a chimera pursued by many votaries of the game, and invariably disastrous in the end.
Preston had made every endeavor to dissuade her from continuing to play. He had assured her that in the long run she must infallibly lose all she had won, and more; but when day after day went by and she almost always came out a winner in the end, she felt she could afford to disregard his advice, well-meant though she knew it to be.
But the worst had happened when one day after she had won a good deal and Preston had again spoken to her, and had finished by trying for the twentieth time to induce her to break her friendship with Jessica, she had suddenly turned upon him, practically told him to mind his own business, and ended by saying that if she were going to break any friendship it would be her friendship with him and not with Jessica.