“Read the name again,” Terry said, controlling his voice.
“Avalesco—the Princess Avalesco.” I felt suddenly frightened. I'd been playing with the public as if people were my puppets. Now I had a vague conviction at the back of my brain that fate had made a puppet of me.
“I thought so. But I couldn't believe my own ears,” said Terry. “Good heavens! What a situation!”
“I don't understand,” I hesitated. “Perhaps you'd rather not have me understand? If so, don't tell me anything.”
“I must tell you!” he said.
“Not unless you wish.”
“I do! We are pals now. You've helped me. Maybe you can go on helping. You'll advise me if there's any way I can use this—this amazing chance.”
I said I'd be glad to help, and then waited for him to make the next move.
Terence Burns sat as if dazed for a few seconds, but presently he asked me to go on with the letter.
I took it up where I'd broken off:
I read fast, and when I'd finished looked up at Terry.
“If you have a secret to tell, I'm ready with advice and sympathy,” said my eyes.
“When the Princess Avalesco was Margaret Revell I was in love with her,” Terry Burns answered them. “I adored her! She was seven or eight years older than I, but the most beautiful thing I ever saw. Of course, she wouldn't look at me! I was about as important as a slum child to her. In America, the Revells were like your royalties. She was a princess even then, without a title. To get one, she sold herself. To think that she should answer that fool advertisement of ours! Heavens! I'm like Tantalus. I see the blessed water I'd give my life to drink held to my lips, only to have it snatched away!”
“Why snatched away?” I questioned,
“Why? Because if there were a moated grange, I could meet her. Her husband's dead. You know he was killed before Roumania'd been fighting a week. Things are very different with me, too, these days. I'm a man, not a boy. And I've come into more money than I ever dreamed I'd have. Not a huge fortune like hers, but a respectable pile. Who knows what might have happened? But there's no moated grange, and so”
“Why shouldn't there be one?” I broke in. And while he stared blankly I hurried on. I reminded him of what I had said yesterday: that there were houses of that description in England, real houses!—my own, for instance, Courtenaye Abbey was out of the question, because it was let to my cousin Jim, and was being shown to the public as a sort of museum, but there were other places. I knew of several. As Captain Burns was so rich, he might hire one and let it to the Princess Avalesco!
For a moment he brightened, but a sudden thought obscured him like a cloud.
“Not places with twisted chimneys!” he groaned.
That brought me up short. I stubbed my brain against the twisted chimney! But when I'd rubbed it—my head, not the chimney—I recovered.
“Yes, places with twisted chimneys! At least, one such place.”
“Ah, Hampton Court. You said the only other twisted chimney was there.”
“The advertisement said that.”
“Well”
“It's a pity,” I admitted, “that I thought of the twisted chimney. It was an unnecessary extravagance, though I meant well. But it never would have occurred to me as an extra lure if I hadn't known about a house where such a chimney exists. The one house of the kind I ever heard of, except Hampton Court.”
Terry sprang to his feet, a changed man, young and vital.
“Can we get it?”
“Ah, if 1 knew! But we can try. If you don't care what you pay.”
“I don't. Not a hang.”
I, too, jumped up, and took from my desk a bulky volume—Burke. This I brought back to my chair, and sat down with it on my lap. Beside me, Terry Burns watched me turn the pages. At “Sc” I stopped, to real aloud all about the Scarletts. But before beginning I warned Terry.
“I never knew any of these Scarletts myself,” I said; “but I've heard my grandmother say they were the wickedest family in England, which meant a lot from her. She wasn't exactly a saint!”
We learned from the book what I had almost forgotten, that Lord Scarlett, the eleventh baron, held the title because his elder brother, Cecil, had died in Australia, unmarried. He himself was married, with one young son, his wife being the daughter of a German wine merchant!