The Sleuth of St. James Street [23]
the damaged honor of a son he loves. Continuing, the girl said: "Of course it isn't true that we spent the nights touring the east coast of England in a racer. It was dark sometimes when we got in - occasionally after trouble with the lights - quite dark. We did go thundering distances." "With this person, alone?" The old woman spoke slowly, like one delicately probing at a wound. "Yes," the girl admitted. "You see, the car was a roadster; only two could go; and, besides, there was no one else. Mr. Meadows said he was alone in London, and of course I was alone. When Sir Henry asked me to go down from here I went straight off to the Ritz." The old woman made a slight, shivering gesture. "You should have gone to my sister in Grosvenor Square. Monte would have put you up - and looked after you." "The Ritz put me up very well," the girl continued. "And I am accustomed to looking after myself. Sir Henry thought it was quite all right." The old woman spoke suddenly with energy and directness. "I don't understand Henry in the least," she said. "I was quite willing for you to go to London when he asked me for permission. But I thought he would take you to Monte's, and certainly I had the right to believe that he would not have lent himself to - to this escapade." "He seemed to be very nice about it," the girl went on. "He came in to tea with us - Mr. Meadows and me - almost every evening. And he always had something amusing to relate, some blunder of Scotland Yard or some ripping mystery. I think he found it immense fun to be Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. I loved the talk: Mr. Meadows was always interested and Sir Henry likes people to be interested." The old woman continued to regard the girl as one hesitatingly touches an exquisite creature frightfully mangled. "This person - was he a gentleman?" she inquired. The girl answered immediately. "I thought about that a good deal," she said. "He had perfect manners, quite Continental manners; but, as you say over here, Americans are so imitative one never can tell. He was not young - near fifty, I would say; very well dressed. He was from St. Paul; a London agent for some flouring mills in the Northwest. I don't know precisely. He explained it all to Sir Henry. I think he would have been glad of a little influence - some way to meet the purchasing agents for the government. He seemed to have the American notion that he could come to London and go ahead without knowing anybody. Anyway, he was immensely interesting - and he had a ripping motor." The old man at the window did not move. He remained looking out over the English country with his big, veined hands clasped behind his back. He had left this interview to Lady Mary, as he had left most of the crucial affairs of life to her dominant nature. But the thing touched him far deeper than it touched the aged dowager. He had a man's faith in the fidelity of a loved woman. He knew how his son, somewhere in France, trusted this girl, believed in her, as long ago in a like youth he had believed in another. He knew also how the charm of the girl was in the young soldier's blood, and how potent were these inscrutable mysteries. Every man who loved a woman wished to believe that she came to him out of the garden of a convent - out of a roc's egg, like the princess in the Arabian story. All these things he had experienced in himself, in a shattered romance, in a disillusioned youth, when he was young like the lad somewhere in France. Lady Mary would see only broken conventions; but he saw immortal things, infinitely beyond conventions, awfully broken. He did not move. He remained like a painted picture. The girl went on in her soft, slow voice. "You would have disliked Mr. Meadows, Lady Mary," she said. "You would dislike any American who came without letters and could not be precisely placed." The girl's voice grew suddenly firmer. "I don't mean to make it appear better," she said. "The worst would be nearer the truth. He was just an unknown American bagman, with a motor car, and a lot of