“A deplorable loss to his family—­and England,” assented the lawyer.  “I am glad to see you.  They ascertained your address for me at the hotel where I am staying.  I have been resting after travelling all night, and I shall go and see the police in the morning.  So far I have only read the reports in the London evening papers, and there may be intimate particulars which were not disclosed to the press.  If such exist, perhaps you will impart them to me.  You need not hesitate to disclose to me all you know.  Your late brother honoured me with his confidence for nearly thirty years.”  Mr. Brimsdown coughed discreetly.

His tone invited confidences which Mrs. Pendleton, in her perplexity of spirit, was only too anxious to impart to a sympathetic ear.  Mr. Brimsdown, sitting stiffly upright, his eyes fixed on a portrait of Royalty glimmering inanely down at them through a dirty glass frame on the opposite wall, listened with unmoved front.  Yet the story had its surprises, even for him.  Not the least of them was the fact that Mrs. Pendleton’s description of her niece tallied with the appearance of the girl whose identity he had tried to recall at Paddington.  He was chagrined to think he had failed to recognize his late client’s daughter, but he recalled that it was ten years since he had seen Sisily, who was then a dark-eyed little girl.  At Norfolk.  Oh, yes! he remembered her readily enough now, playing innocently about some forgotten tombstones in a deserted graveyard on a wild grey coast, while her father wrested savagely with the dead for his heritage.  Strange that he should have met her again at the moment of her flight, when he was setting out for Cornwall in response to her dead father’s letter!  Life had such ironical mischances.

He said nothing of this chance encounter, or of Robert Turold’s letter, to the dead man’s sister who was now pouring out her fears and suspicions to him.  He was a receptacle into which confidences might be emptied, but he gave nothing in return.  Mrs. Pendleton did not need that.  Her state of mind compelled her to speak, and her impulsiveness hurried her along on the high tide of a flood of words.  The story she had to tell oppressed her listener with the sense of some great unknown horror.  It was like trying to see a dark place by lightning.  The flashes of her revelations revealed a distorted surface, but not the hidden depths.  Mrs. Pendleton’s agitated mind, doubling in and out a maze of conjectures like a distracted hare, turned again and again to the question of Sisily’s complicity in her father’s death.

“I can hardly believe it even now,” she said with a shudder.  “Such a sweet pretty girl!  And yet—­there was something strange in her manner.  I remarked it to Joseph—­my husband—­before this happened.”  She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.

The lawyer, with a sideways glance at the Royal portrait opposite, which seemed in the act of smiling blandly at his companion’s grief, reflected, soberly enough, that sweet and pretty girls were as human as the rest of creation, if it came to that.