His companion’s lips hardened.
“Marion!” he exclaimed. “I have done all I can. I’ve left no effort untried. I have sought the aid of the best confidential inquiry agency in London, and all to no avail. She’s disappeared—as completely as Maud has done!”
“Yes, I know,” replied her brother, thrusting his hands deep into the trousers-pockets of his blue serge travelling-suit. “I’ve seen Statham.”
“And so have I. He wrote to Cunnington’s, but the latter has not replied. I saw Cunnington myself.”
“And what did he say?”
“The fellow refused to say anything,” he replied in a hard tone.
Silence again fell between the pair.
The long, old-fashioned room, with its blue china, its chintz coverings, its grand piano, and its bowls of autumn roses, though full of quaint charm, was weird and unsuited to the home of a bachelor. Indeed, Kilmaronock was a white elephant to Max. He received a fair rental from the farms on the estate, but he never went near the place except for sport for six weeks or so each autumn. The old place possessed some bitter memories for him, for his mother had died there quite suddenly of heart disease on the night of a large dinner-party. He was only eighteen then, but he remembered it too well. It was that tragic memory which had caused him to abandon the place except when he invited a few of his friends to shoot over the estate.
“Let’s go into my own room to talk,” he suggested. “It’s more cosy there.” As a man hates all drawing-rooms, so did Max Barclay detest his. It was for him full of recollections of his dear dead mother.
And so they passed along the corridor to Max’s own little den in the east wing of the house, a pleasant little room overlooking the deep shady glen from whence rose the constant music of the ever-rippling burn.