Grosse’s visit was the first real distraction the older man had that day.  It was impossible for the solicitor not to be interested in the probability that Edmund Grosse had lost a great fortune.  The affair teemed with professional interest, and then he liked the man himself.  He had a taste for the type, for the man who knows how to cut a figure in the great world without being vulgar or ostentatious.  He liked Edmund’s manner, his tact, his gift for putting people at their ease.  Rumour said that the baronet had shown pluck since the news had come, and had behaved handsomely to underlings.  Most men become agitated, irritable, and even cruel when driven into such a position.

It never entered into Murray’s imagination to appear to know that Edmund had any cause for care:  he was not his solicitor, and he knew that his visitor had not come about his own affairs.  But he could not conceal an added degree of respect, and liking even, under the impenetrable manner which hid his own aching sense of close personal suffering.  Grosse answered the firm hand-grip with a kindly smile.

“I only heard of Madame Danterre’s death when I got to Genoa on our return journey.”

“And she died just before you left London,” said Murray.

“Yes; I must have overlooked the paper in which it was announced, although I thought I read up all arrears of news whenever we went into port.  I wonder no one mentioned it in Cairo; there were several people there who seemed posted up in Lady Rose’s affairs.  What do you know about Madame Danterre’s will?”

“Very little but rumour; nothing is published.  Miss Dexter was too ill to attend to business until about two weeks ago; she only saw her lawyer at the end of January.  Anyhow, Madame Danterre having died abroad makes delays in this sort of business.  But I have been wanting to see you,” he said.

Something in his manner made Grosse ask him if he had news.

“Nothing very definite, but things are moving in your direction; and something small, but solid, is the fact that old Akers’s son, and the other private, Stock, who witnessed some deed or other for Sir David, are coming home.  The regiment is on its way back in the Jumna.”

Edmund, watching the strong, heavy face, could see that this interested him less than something else as yet unexpressed.

Murray leant back in the round office chair, and crossed his legs in the well of the massive table before him.  Edmund bent forward, his face sunburnt and healthy after the weeks on the yacht, but the eyes seemed tired.

“I don’t know that it comes to much,” Murray went on slowly, “but three days after Madame Danterre’s death a foreigner asked to see me who refused to give his name to my clerk.  I had him shown in, and thought him a superior man—­not, perhaps, a gentleman, but a man with brains.  He asked in rather queer English whether I would object to giving him all the information I could, without