He laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm on the desk with a noise which made his sister start. Apparently the diversion recalled something to her mind.
“There was a man in here asking about you today,” she remarked, in a casual fashion. “Said he was an old friend of yours.”
“Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now,” he observed with beaming indifference. “I'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and dances and all that. One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter for some salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland. I told him I couldn't come, but he put my name down all the same. Says his wife will write to remind me. Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in, they'll simply shower attentions of that sort on me. He says the social pressure they can command, for a game of this kind, is something tremendous. But I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth, d'ye see? I dine with nobody! I fish and shoot and go yachting with nobody! Julia and Alfred and our own home in Ovington Square--that'll be good enough for me. By the way--you haven't been out to see us yet. We're all settled now. You must come at once--why not with me, now?”
Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. She had been rummaging among some loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to lift the lid and search about for something inside.
“He left a card for you,” she said, as she groped among the desk's contents. “I don't know what I did with it. He wrote something on it.”
“Oh, damn him, and his card too,” Thorpe protested easily. “I don't want to see either of them.”
“He said he knew you in Mexico. He said you'd had dealings together. He seemed to act as if you'd want to see him--but I didn't know. I didn't tell him your address.”
Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest, but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention. He sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked sharply up at his sister.
“What was his name?” he asked with abruptness.
“I don't in the least remember,” she made answer, holding the desk-top up, but temporarily suspending her search. “He was a little man, five-and-fifty, I should think. He had long grey hair--a kind of Quaker-looking man. He said he saw the name over the door, and he remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got back here in England yesterday or the day before. He said he didn't know what you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether you were in England or not!”