Page:A Gentleman's Gentleman.djvu/36

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add no information to our own. They went to the house to which we had been asked to send the photograph, and found it in a slum in Hammersmith—an empty house, once kept by a woman who let lodgings, but then deserted and almost in ruins. Nor was there any friend of Miss More who could add to what we knew. As for Connoley, he had gone to Scotland the very day his sister-in-law died. No one knew his address, and we took it that he saw nothing in the papers. Indeed, he told me, when I met him in Paris a year later, that he never learned the news until a month after his kinswoman was dead.

All this did not help me in getting at what I wanted; nor was my master any readier in doing what I could not do.

"’Tis a story of trouble, ye may be sure," he said to me on the second morning, "but I doubt if any man will write it. Whatever it was, it must have happened after I gave her the promise to take her picture. 'Twould be terrible to think that she meant it otherwise."

"That's so, sir," said I. "Yet, when a woman is driven to that state, God knows what she won't think of! Be sure of this, that she wanted somebody to know she was dead, and this was the queer idea she had of telling him."

"Would it be the man who wrote me the murdering letter?" he asked.

"I have no doubt of it—her husband, very likely,