“So I can see.”

“Very well, then, I want to know who started all this.  It may be perfectly true, as you say, but who found it out?  If you can’t tell me I must ask somebody else.”

The ruddy Alpine colouring had suddenly become accentuated in the case of Quinby.

“As a matter of fact,” said he, “it was I who first heard of it, quite by chance.  You can’t blame me for that, Clephane.”

“Of course not,” said I encouragingly.

“Well, unfortunately I let it out; and you know how things get about in an hotel.”

“It was unfortunate,” I agreed.  “But how on earth did you come to hear?”

Quinby hummed and hawed; he had heard from a soldier friend, a man who had known her in India, a man whom I knew myself, in fact Hamilton the sapper, who had telegraphed to Quinby to secure me my room.  I ought to have been disarmed by the coincidence; but I recalled our initial conversation, about India and Hamilton and Mrs. Lascelles, and I could not consider it a coincidence at all.

“You don’t mean to tell me,” said I, aping the surprise I might have felt, “that our friend wrote and gave Mrs. Lascelles away to you of his own accord?”

But Quinby did not vouchsafe an answer.  “Hard luck, Sir John!” cried he, as the judge missed an easy cannon, leaving his opponent a still easier one, which lost him the game.  I proceeded to press my question in a somewhat stronger form, though still with all the suavity at my command.

“Surely,” I urged, “you must have written to ask him about her first?”

“That’s my business, I fancy,” said Quinby, with a peculiarly aggressive specimen of the nasal snigger of which enough was made in a previous chapter, but of which Quinby himself never tired.

“Quite,” I agreed; “but do you also consider it your business to inquire deliberately into the past life of a lady whom I believe you only know by sight, and to spread the result of your inquiries broadcast in the hotel?  Is that your idea of chivalry?  I shall ask Sir John Sankey whether it is his,” I added, as the judge joined us with genial condescension, and I recollected that his proverbial harshness toward the male offender was redeemed by an extraordinary sympathy with the women.  Thereupon I laid a general case before Sir John, asking him point-blank whether he considered such conduct as Quinby’s (but I did not say whose the conduct was) either justifiable in itself or conducive to the enjoyment of a holiday community like ours.

“It depends,” said the judge, cocking a critical eye on the now furious Quinby.  “I am afraid we most of us enjoy our scandal, and for my part I always like to see a humbug catch it hot.  But if the scandal’s about a woman, and if it’s an old scandal, and if she’s a lonely woman, that quite alters the case, and in my opinion the author of it deserves all he gets.”