“Should I know him?” repeated Dunn contemptuously.  “Should I know myself?”

“That’s good,” said Deede Dawson again.  “By the way, perhaps you can tell me, hasn’t Lord Chobham a rather distant cousin, Walter Dunsmore, living with him as secretary or something of the sort —­quite a distant relative, I believe, though in the direct line of succession?”

“Very likely,” said Dunn indifferently.  “I think so, but I don’t care anything about the rest of them.  It’s only Rupert Dunsmore I have anything against.”

CHAPTER XIX

THE VISIT TO WRESTE ABBEY

It was a little later when Deede Dawson returned to the subject of Wreste Abbey.

“Lord Chobham has a very valuable collection of plate and jewellery and so on, hasn’t he?” he asked.

“Oh, there’s plenty of the stuff there,” Dunn answered.  “Why?”

“Oh, I was thinking a visit might be made fairly profitable,” Deede Dawson said carelessly, for the first time definitely throwing off his mask of law-abiding citizen under which he lived at Bittermeads.

“It would be a risky job,” answered Dunn, showing no surprise at the suggestion.  “The stuff’s well guarded, and then, that’s not what I’m thinking about—­it’s meeting Rupert Dunsmore, man to man, and no one to come between us.  If that ever happens—­”

Deede Dawson nodded reassuringly.

“That’ll be all right,” he said.  “So you shall, I promise you that.  But we might as well kill two birds with one stone and clear a bit of profit, too.  I’ve got to live, like any one else, and I haven’t five thousand a year of my own, so I get my living out of those who have, and I don’t see who has any right to blame me.  Mind, if there was any money in chess, I should be a millionaire, but there isn’t, and if a man can make a fortune on the Stock Exchange, which takes no more thought or skill than auction-bridge, why shouldn’t I make a bit when I can?  There’s the ‘D.  D.’ gambit I’ve invented, people will be studying and playing for centuries, but it’ll never bring me a penny for all the brain-work I put into it, and so I’ve got to protect myself, haven’t I?”

“It’s what I do with less talk about it,” answered Dunn contemptuously.  “Why, I’ve guessed all that from the first when you weren’t so all-fired keen on seeing me in gaol, as most of your honest, hard-working lot, who only do their swindling in business-hours, would have been.  And I’ve kept my eyes open, of course.  It wasn’t hard to twig you did a bit on the cross yourself.  Well, that’s your affair, but one thing I do want to know—­how much does Miss Cayley know?”

For all his efforts he could not keep his anxiety entirely out of his voice as he said this, and recognizing that thereby he had perhaps risked rousing some suspicion in the other’s mind, he added: 

“And her mother—­the young lady and her mother, how much do they know?”