“I believe he has vanished,” said Harry.

“Oh yes, of course he’s vanished.  Everybody knows that—­he vanished ever so long ago; but where is he?”

“If you can tell them in Scotland Yard they will be obliged to you.”

“I suppose it is true the police are after him?  Dear me!  Forty thousand a year!  This is a very queer story about the property, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know the story exactly, and therefore can hardly say whether it is queer or not.”

“But about the younger son?  People say that the father has contrived that the younger son shall have the money.  What I hear is that the whole property is to be divided, and that the captain is to have half, on conditions that he keeps out of the way.  But I am sure that you know more about it.  You used to be intimate with both the brothers.  I have seen you down here with the captain.  Where is he?” And again he whispered into Harry’s ear.  But he could not have selected any subject more distasteful, and, therefore, Harry repulsed Mr. Baskerville not in the most courteous manner.

“Hang it! what airs that fellow gives himself,” he said to another friend of the same kidney.  “That’s young Annesley, the son of a twopenny-halfpenny parson down in Hertfordshire.  The kind of ways these fellows put on now are unbearable.  He hasn’t got a horse to ride on, but to hear him talk you’d think he was mounted three days a week.”

“He’s heir to old Prosper, of Buston Hall.”

“How’s that?  But is he?  I never heard that before.  What’s Buston Hall worth?” Then Mr. Baskerville made up his mind to be doubly civil to Harry Annesley the next time he saw him.

Harry had to consider on that night in what manner he would endeavor to see Florence Mountjoy on the next day.  He was thoroughly discontented with himself as he walked about the streets of Cheltenham.  He had now not only allowed the disappearance of Scarborough to pass by without stating when and where, and how he had last seen him, but had directly lied on the subject.  He had told the man’s brother that he had not seen him for some weeks previous, whereas to have concealed his knowledge on such a subject was in itself held to be abominable.  He was ashamed of himself, and the more so because there was no one to whom he could talk openly on the matter.  And it seemed to him as though all whom he met questioned him as to the man’s disappearance, as if they suspected him.  What was the man to him, or the man’s guilt, or his father, that he should be made miserable?  The man’s attack upon him had been ferocious in its nature,—­so brutal that when he had escaped from Mountjoy Scarborough’s clutches there was nothing for him but to leave him lying in the street where, in his drunkenness, he had fallen.  And now, in consequence of this, misery had fallen upon himself.  Even this empty-headed fellow Baskerville, a man the poverty of whose character Harry perfectly understood, had questioned him about Mountjoy Scarborough.  It could not, he thought, be possible that Baskerville could have had any reasons for suspicion, and yet the very sound of the inquiry stuck in his ears.