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“Going away?”

“Yes. He went yesterday.”

“Where to?”

“I dunno. I thought he had money at the back of him somewhere—he always seemed to have—but he evidently hadn’t, for when I saw him after the theatre, night before last, he announced that funds had run out, and that he was leaving next day.”

“If he hadn’t any money he can’t have gone far.”

“Oh, can’t he! He’s awfully keen on the sea—he’s worked his passage on ships often, he told me. He didn’t know where he was going himself—he said it depended on where the first ship went. He may be still in London, because he said perhaps he wouldn’t be able to get a berth at first. But that’s not very likely, and I’ll bet you can’t find him, even if you want to.”

“Well, dear child!” Aunt Sophia was smiling, intensely relieved at Archie’s news. “You see how absurdly unnecessarily you worked yourself into such a state. Is it likely, as Archie says, that a man who could prove himself the owner of Trent Stoke would voluntarily disappear without making a claim? I am only annoyed to think that you should have been spoken to in such a way.”

But Pamela’s mouth was set and unsmiling.

“He said nothing to you at all, Archie, about his father or his people?”

“Not a word. Not a word that connected him with us—with you, anyway.”

“No, because he didn’t know of the relationship himself till just before he told me. Someone told him when he went out during the interval.”

“Relationship, Pamela! You really mustn’t talk as if you believed this preposterous story.”

“But it isn’t preposterous, Aunt Sophia. Don’t you