“Better not—at least at present, my dear fellow. Besides—for his daughter’s sake.”
“Daughter be hanged! She’s as bad as her father, every bit.”
“No, I disagree with you there,” I protested. “The girl is innocent of it all. She believes implicitly in her father, but beyond that she is in some deadly fear—of what I can’t yet make out.”
“Then you’ve seen her lately, eh?”
“Quite recently,” I replied, though I told him nothing of the exciting events of the past seven or eight days. The knowledge I had gathered I intended to keep to myself, at least for the present.
About four o’clock that afternoon I called upon Ella’s aunt, a widow named Tremayne, who lived in a comfortable house in Porchester Terrace. I was ceremoniously shown into the drawing-room by the grey-headed old butler, and presently Mrs Tremayne, an angular old person in a cap with yellow ribbons, appeared, staring at me through her gold-rimmed spectacles and carrying my card in her hand.
I had met her on one occasion only, in the days when Ella and I used to meet in secret in those squares about Bayswater, and I saw that she did not recollect me.
“I have called,” I said, “to ask if you can tell me whether your brother, Mr Murray, is in London. I heard that he and Miss Ella have gone back to Wichenford, but I think that they may possibly be in town just now. I have only to-day returned from abroad, and do not want to journey down to Worcestershire if they are in London.”
She regarded me for a few moments with a puzzled air, then said in a hard, haughty voice: “Your name is somehow familiar to me. Am I right in thinking that you were the Mr Leaf whom my niece knew two or three years ago?”
“I am,” I replied. “I have met Miss Murray again, and our friendship has been resumed.”