He sits all day in bed and plays cards with his granddaughter or with a very superior valet, and talks politics with the men who come to see him.  Oh yes, he’s a quaint old beggar.  He has a great quantity of white hair and an enormous square white beard and the fiercest eyes I ever saw, I should think.  Everybody’s frightened out of their wits of him.  Well, he sits up there and rules his family in good old patriarchal style, and it seems he came down a bit hard on the poor boy one day over some folly or other, and there was a row and the boy went out of the house swearing he’d be even.”

“Ah, well, then,” said Ste. Marie, “the matter seems simple enough.  A foolish boy’s foolish pique.  He is staying in hiding somewhere to frighten his grandfather.  When he thinks the time favorable he will come back and be wept over and forgiven.”

The other man walked a little way in silence.

“Ye-es,” he said, at last.  “Yes, possibly.  Possibly you are right.  That’s what the grandfather thinks.  It’s the obvious solution.  Unfortunately there is more or less against it.  The boy went away with—­so far as can be learned—­almost no money, almost none at all.  And he has already been gone a month.  Miss Benham, his sister, is sure that something has happened to him, and I’m a bit inclined to think so, too.  It’s all very odd.  I should think he might have been kidnapped but that no demand has been made for money.”

“He was not,” suggested Ste. Marie—­“not the sort of young man to do anything desperate—­make away with himself?” Hartley laughed.

“Oh, Lord, no!” said he.  “Not that sort of young man at all.  He was a very normal type of rich and spoiled and somewhat foolish American boy.”

“Rich?” inquired the other, quickly.

“Oh yes; they’re beastly rich.  Young Arthur is to come into something very good at his majority, I believe, from his father’s estate, and the old grandfather is said to be indecently rich—­rolling in it!  There’s another reason why the young idiot wouldn’t be likely to stop away of his own accord.  He wouldn’t risk anything like a serious break with the old gentleman.  It would mean a loss of millions to him, I dare say, for the old beggar is quite capable of cutting him off if he takes the notion.  Oh, it’s a bad business all through.”

And after they had gone on a bit he said it again, shaking his head: 

“It’s a bad business!  That poor girl, you know.  It’s hard on her.  She was fond of the young ass for some reason or other.  She’s very much broken up over it.”

“Yes,” said Ste. Marie, “it is hard for her—­for all the family, of course.  A bad business, as you say.”  He spoke absently, for he was looking ahead at something which seemed to be a motor accident.  They had by this time got well up the Champs-Elysees and were crossing the Rond Point.  A motor-car was drawn up alongside the curb just beyond, and a little knot of people stood about it and seemed to look at something on the ground.