It was the identity of the friend in question that he was deeply anxious to establish, so that in future he would know whom to doubt and whom to trust.
Was Max Barclay really his friend?
Hour upon hour he reflected upon that problem. He recollected incidents which, in his present state of mind, filled him with misgivings. Why had he openly charged him with having been present at the house in Cromwell Road after the disappearance of the Doctor and his daughter? Indeed, had he not practically charged him with opening the Doctor’s safe and abstracting its contents? He had not made the charge directly, it was true, but his remarks had certainly been made in a spirit of antagonistic suspicion.
A long letter from Max explained the sudden disappearance of Marion from Cunnington’s, and begged him to give all information regarding any likely quarter where the girl had sought refuge. It was now plain enough to Charlie that his sister had been discharged from the establishment in Oxford Street—and in disgrace! In what disgrace?
When he read the letter in his room at the hotel, he crushed it in his hand with an imprecation upon his lips. Cunnington should answer to him for this indignity. He would compel the fellow to tell him the truth. His sister’s honour was at stake.
Disgraced by her sudden discharge, she had disappeared. She had, no doubt, been ashamed to face the man who loved her, ashamed, too, to write to her brother. Instead, she preferred to go away and efface herself, as, alas! so many London shop-girls have done before her.
Charlie Rolfe knew the cruelty practised by many a shop-keeper in London in discharging their female employées at a moment’s notice. For a man it matters little. Perhaps, indeed, it is best for both parties. But for a helpless girl without friends, without money, and without home to be cast suddenly upon the great world of London, filled as it is with lures and temptations, is a grave sin which no tradesman ought to commit. And yet there are to-day in London and its suburbs hundreds of smug, top-hatted, frock-coated tradesmen, who, though pillars of their chapels and churches and stalking round the aisles with their plush collecting-bags on Sundays, will on six days in the week cast forth any poor girl in their employ without a grain of sympathy or compunction merely because she may break a rule, or even because she does not lie to customers sufficiently well to induce them to make purchases.
The general public are ignorant of the tyranny of shop-life in London. There have been strikes—strikes quickly suppressed because, by lifting his finger the employer is overwhelmed with assistants glad to live on a mere bread and butter wage—and those strikes have been treated humorously by the evening papers. Ah! the tragedy of it all.
Charles Rolfe, though secretary and trusted factotum of a millionaire, knew it all. His sister had been in a snug “billet,” one from which he had fondly believed she could never have been dislodged.
But the hard, bitter truth was now apparent. Even his own brotherly protection had availed her nothing. She had been consigned to disgrace.