“As well as I can tell you, he’s like an odd but very engaging boy, with something pathetic about him; quite splendidly handsome—­”

“Oh, he had good looks to spare when I first knew him,” George said bitterly.  “I dare say he’s got them back if he’s taken care of himself, or been taken care of, rather!  But go on; I won’t interrupt you again.  Why did he come here?  Hoping to see—­”

“No.  When he came here he did not know of her existence except in the vaguest way.  But to go back to that, I’d better tell you first that the woman we saw with him, one day on the boulevard, and who was in the accident with him—­”

“La Mursiana, the dancer; I know.”

“She had got him to go through a marriage with her—­”

“What?” Ward’s eyes flashed as he shouted the word.

“It seems inexplicable; but as I understand it, he was never quite sober at that time; he had begun to use drugs, and was often in a half-stupefied condition.  As a matter of fact, the woman did what she pleased with him.  There’s no doubt about the validity of the marriage.  And what makes it so desperate a muddle is that since the marriage she’s taken good care to give no grounds upon which a divorce could be obtained for Harman.  She means to hang on.”

“I’m glad of that!” said George, striking his knee with his open palm.  “That will go a great way toward—­”

He paused, and asked suddenly:  “Did this marriage take place in France?”

“Yes.  You’d better hear me through,” I remonstrated.  “When he was taken from the hospital, he was placed in charge of a Professor Keredec, a madman of whom you’ve probably heard.”

“Madman?  Why, no; he’s a member of the Institute; a psychologist or metaphysician, isn’t he?—­at any rate of considerable celebrity.”

“Nevertheless,” I insisted grimly, “as misty a vapourer as I ever saw; a poetic, self-contradicting and inconsistent orator, a blower of bubbles, a seer of visions, a mystic, and a dreamer—­about as scientific as Alice’s White Knight!  Harman’s aunt, who lived in London, the only relative he had left, I believe—­and she has died since—­put him in Keredec’s charge, and he was taken up into the Tyrol and virtually hidden for two years, the idea being literally to give him something like an education—­Keredec’s phrase is ‘restore mind to his soul’!  What must have been quite as vital was to get him out of his horrible wife’s clutches.  And they did it, for she could not find him.  But she picked up that rat in the garden out yonder—­he’d been some sort of stable-manager for Harman once—­and set him on the track.  He ran the poor boy down, and yesterday she followed him.  Now it amounts to a species of sordid siege.”

“She wants money, of course.”