Benton was silent.  The affair was a distinctly unsavoury one.  Frank van Geen, the son of the Dutch-American millionaire cocoa manufacturer of Chicago, had, by reason of his association with Molly, found himself the poorer by nearly a quarter of a million francs, and his body had been found in the Seine between the Pont d’Auteuil and the Ile St. Germain.  At the inquiry some ugly disclosures were made, but already the lady of the Rue Racine and her supposed niece had left Paris; and though the affair was one of suicide, the police raised a hue and cry, and the frontiers had been watched, but the pair had disappeared.

That was several months ago.  And now Molly Maxwell the adventuress in Paris had been transformed into the wealthy and highly respectable widow Mrs. Bond, who having presented such excellent references had become tenant of that well-furnished mansion, Shapley Manor, and the beautiful grounds adjoining.  For nearly two centuries it had been the home of the Puttenhams, but Sir George Puttenham, Baronet, the present owner, had found himself ruined by war-taxation, and as one of the new poor he had been glad to let the place and live upon the rent obtained for it.  His case, indeed, was only one of thousands of others in England, where adventurers and war-profiteers were ousting the landed gentry.

“Yvonne is evidently keeping a good watch upon young Hugh,” remarked Benton presently, as he blew a ring of cigarette smoke towards the ceiling.

“Yes,” replied the woman, her eyes fixed out of the big window which commanded a glorious view of Gibbet Hill, at Hindhead, and the blue South Downs towards the English Channel.  But all was dark and lowering in the winter twilight, now fast darkening into night.

In old-world Guildford, the county town of Surrey, with its steep High Street containing many seventeenth-century houses, its old inns, and its balconied Guildhall—­the scene of so many unseemly wrangles among the robed and cocked-hatted borough councillors who are, par excellence, outstanding illustrations of the provincial petty jealousies of bumbledom—­Mrs. Bond was welcomed by the trades-people who vied with each other to “serve her.”  Almost daily she went up and down the High Street in her fine Rolls-Royce driven by Mead, an ex-soldier and a worthy fellow whom she had engaged through an advertisement in the Surrey Advertiser.  He had been in the Queen’s West Surrey, and his home being in Guildford, Molly knew that he would serve as a testimonial to her high respectability.  Molly Maxwell was an outstandingly clever woman.  She never let a chance slip by that might be taken advantageously.

Mead, who went on his “push-bike” every evening along the Hog’s Back to Guildford, was never tired of singing the praises of his generous mistress.

“She’s a real good sort,” he would tell his friends in the bar of the Lion or the Angel.  “She knows how to treat a man.  She’s a widow, and good-looking.  I suppose she’ll marry again.  Nearly all the best people about here have called on her within the last week or two.  Magistrates and their wives, retired generals, and lots of the gentry.  Yes, my job isn’t to be sneezed at, I can tell you.  It’s better than driving a lorry outside Ypres!”