“The wife died. The girl was packed off to Australia. It seems she couldn’t bear the sight of her child, and it was taken away from her. I can’t tell you whether the case got as far as the law-courts, or whether it was hushed up. Your friend Miss Gault knows all about it.”

Wolf was silent, meditating upon all this.

“Not a very pleasant background for the other daughter!” he brought out at last.

“Oh, she’s a funny little thing,” said Darnley, smiling. “She lives so completely in books, that I don’t think she takes anything that happens in the real world very seriously. She always seems to me, when I meet her, as if she’d just come out of a deep trance and wanted to return to it. She and I get on splendidly. Well, you’ll see her in a minute, and can judge for yourself.”