“That is Mrs. Pursill,” said her daughter.

Charles glanced at the old woman in the chair and turned away.  She was past anything except waiting for death, and it was impossible to speak to her or question her.  She was in the last stage of senile decay.  He masked his disappointment with an effort, conscious that the eyes of the younger woman were fixed on his face.

“If there is anything I can tell you—­” she simpered, as she met his glance.

His face betrayed his anxiety.

“I had some reason to think that a young lady of my acquaintance, the daughter of an old friend of your mother’s, might be staying with her.”

“There is no young lady here,” said Miss Pursill with a hard look.  “I know nothing about it.  What is her name?”

“I have made a mistake, I am afraid.”  Charles was instantly on his guard.  “I am really very sorry—­”

She was not altogether proof against the winning smile with which he tendered an apology, but she looked at him strangely as she accompanied him downstairs to the front door.

Charles went back to London with a dark and angry face.  His anger was directed against Fate, which had arranged such a fantastic anticlimax for his cherished hopes.  The blow was almost too much for him.  He had deceived himself into thinking that he would find Sisily at Charleswood, and he felt that he had really lost her.  He was now reduced to searching for her in the great wilderness of London, which seemed a hopeless task.

By the time the train reached Charing Cross he rallied from his fit of despondency.  He refused to despair.  Sisily was somewhere in London, at that moment walking alone among its countless hordes, perhaps thinking of him.  He would find her—­he must!  Where to commence?  She had reached Paddington only a few nights ago, so that was obviously the logical starting-point of any inquiries.  To Paddington he went, this time in a taxi-cab.

He had an extraordinary initial piece of luck.  Fortune, either regretting her previous treatment or tantalizing him in feminine fashion with the expectation of greater favours to come, threw him at the very outset of his inquiries against the red-headed luggage porter who had spoken with Sisily on her arrival from Penzance.  The porter, leaning against the white enamelled walls of a Tube passage, pictured the scene with much loquacity, and a faithful recollection of his own share in the interview.  Charles anxiously asked him if the young lady he had encountered was very pretty—­pale and dark.  The porter, with a judicial air, responded that looks in women was, after all, a matter of taste—­what was one man’s meat was another man’s poison, as you might say—­but this young lady had dark hair and eyes, and her face hadn’t too much colour in it, so far as he remembered.  He apologized for this vagueness of description on the plea that one girl was very like another to a man who saw them in droves every day, as he did.  But one or two minute particulars of her dress which he was able to supply convinced Charles that he had seen Sisily.  The man added that as far as he knew the young lady went on to Euston Square, though he couldn’t say he’d actually seen her catch the train for there.