“Well, she certainly seems devoted to him and will not hear a word against him. But what can one think under the circumstances?”
The drawing-room opened on to a wide verandah and across the promenade we could see the rolling Channel surf beating upon the beach. The winter’s day was dull and boisterous and now and again sheets of flying spray swept across the promenade.
“He pretended to me that he was an electrical engineer,” I remarked, “but I have found out that the firm for whom he said he worked knows nothing of him.”
“That is what he also told me. But I have reason to believe that he is in fact a young man of considerable fortune. Yet, if so, why has he deserted poor Thelma?”
“I am doing my level best to find him, Mrs. Shaylor,” I said. “Some very great mystery enshrouds this affair, and I have, in your daughter’s interest, set myself to solve it.”
“I’m sure all this is extremely good of you,” she said, gratefully. “We are only women, and both of us powerless.”
I paused for a moment. Then I said:
“I really came down here, Mrs. Shaylor, to put several direct questions to you. I wonder if you will answer them and thus lighten my task. I am a solicitor, as perhaps you already know.”
“Certainly. What are they?”
“Has your daughter ever known a man named Harold Ruthen?”