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"Instead of me?" he asked, to make sure. She endeavored not to show embarrassment and told herself it didn't really matter to a thoroughly nice person. But "He was the next of kin before you. I'm so sorry I didn't know you hadn't heard of him. It seemed natural that Mr. Palford should have mentioned him." "He did say that there was a young fellow who had died, but he didn't tell me about him.
"Had he been invited to the ball?" laughed Palliser. "I did not gather that," replied Mr. Palford gravely. "He had apparently watched the arriving guests from some railings near by or perhaps it was a lamp-post with other news-boys." "He recognized the likeness to Strangeways, no doubt, and it gave him what he calls a 'jolt," said Captain Palliser.
"It seems sort of like a joke till you get on to it," he said. "But I guess it ain't such a merry jest as it seems." And then Mr. Palford did begin to observe that he had lost his color entirely; also that he had a rather decent, sharp-cut face, and extremely white and good young teeth, which he showed not unattractively when he smiled. And he smiled frequently, but he was not smiling now.
But would you mind telling me what the exact evidence is so far? Mr. Palford had been opening a budget of papers. "It is evidence which is cumulative, your Grace," he said. "Mr. Temple Temple Barholm's position would have been a far less suspicious one as you yourself suggested if he had remained, or if he hadn't secretly removed Mr. Mr. Strangeways."
Palford should express annoyance, but the effort to restrain the expression of it was in his countenance. Was it possible that the American habit of being jocular had actually held its own in a matter as serious as this? And could even the most cynical and light-minded of ducal personages have been involved in its unworthy frivolities?
Palford did not know of this festivity, as he also found he was not told of several other things. This he counted as a feature of his client's exoticism. His extraordinary lack of concealment of things vanity forbids many from confessing combined itself with a quite cheerful power to keep his own counsel when he was, for reasons of his own, so inclined.
He had been afraid at first. She might have hated it, as Palford did, and it would have hurt him somehow if she hadn't understood. But she did. Without quite realizing the fact, she was beginning to love it, to wish she had seen it. Her Somerset vicarage imagination did not allow of such leaps as would be implied by the daring wish that sometime she might see it.
Palford looked perhaps slightly nervous when he was handed into the bed-sitting-room, and found himself confronting Hutchinson and Little Ann and the table set for the oyster stew.
He did not intend to leave the field clear and the stew to its fate if he could help it. He gave Ann a protesting frown. "I dare say Mr. Palford doesn't mind us," he said. "We're not strangers." "Not in the least," Palford protested. "Certainly not. If you are old friends, you may be able to assist us."
But being, as before remarked, a timid man, and recalling the interview between himself and his employer held outside the dining-room door, and having also a disturbing memory of the sharp, cool, boyish eye and the tone of the casual remark that he had "a head on his shoulders" and that it was "up to him to make the others understand," it seemed as well to restrain his inclinations until the proof Palford & Grimby required was forthcoming.
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