“I have no knowledge of the gentleman,” she declared. Yet had I not seen them together in Kensington Gardens?
“I don’t know whether he is known to you as Suzor,” I said. Then I described him as accurately as I could.
But the woman shook her head. For the first time she now lied to me. With my own eyes I had seen the man approach her and the girl, and after they had greeted each other, she had risen and left the girl alone with him.
Curiously enough when the pair were alone together they seemed to understand each other. I recollected it all most vividly.
To say the least it was strange why, being so frank upon other details, she so strenuously denied all knowledge of the affable Frenchman who had been my fellow-traveller from York almost immediately preceding my strange adventures in the heart of London.
My conversation with her had been, to say the least, highly illuminating, and I had learnt several facts of which I had been in ignorance. But this fixed assertion that she knew nothing of the elusive Frenchman aroused my suspicions.
What was she hiding from me?
I felt that she was concealing some very essential point—one that might well prove the clue to the whole puzzling enigma.
And while we spoke the girl’s clear contralto rang out, while she herself played the accompaniment.
At length I saw that I could obtain no further information from the servant, therefore I begged to be introduced to her young mistress, assuring her of my keen interest in the most puzzling problem.