"Any news, sir?" cried George Carton. "Have you discovered anything?"
"Nothing," I replied, not pausing to inquire why he should put a question so direct to me.
"Nothing!" he muttered. "Nothing! But it shall be brought to light--it shall, or I will not live!"
"Come, come, my dear boy," said the elder man. "What is the use of going on in this frantic manner? It won't better things."
"How am I to be sure of that?" retorted Carton. "It won't better things to stand idly aside, and think and think about it without ever moving a step."
"My ward knows you, sir," said Carton's friend, "and I confess I was endeavouring to persuade him to come home with me when you were running after the newspaper boy. He insisted that your sudden appearance in this square was a strange and eventful coincidence."
"A strange and eventful coincidence!" I exclaimed, and thought, without giving my thought expression, that there was something strange in the circumstance of my being in Fanny Lemon's house, about to listen to a revelation which was not unlikely to have some bearing upon the tragic event, and in being thus unexpectedly confronted by the young man who was to have been married to the murdered girl.
"Yes, that is his idea," said Carton's friend; "but I am really forgetting my manners. Allow me to introduce myself. You are acquainted with my ward, George Carton, the dearest, most generous-hearted, most magnanimous young fellow in the world. I have the happiness to be his guardian. My name is Kenneth Dowsett."
He was a smiling, fair-faced man, with blue, dreamy eyes, and his voice and manners were most agreeable. I murmured that I was very pleased to make his acquaintance.
"My ward," continued Mr. Dowsett, laying his hand affectionately on Carton's shoulder, "has also an odd idea in reference to this dreadful affair, that something significant and pregnant will be discovered in an odd and unaccountable fashion. Heaven knows, I don't want to deprive him of any consolation he can derive from his imaginings. I have too sincere a love for him; but I am a man of the world, and it grieves me to see him indulge in fancies which can lead to no good result. To tell you the honest truth," Mr. Dowsett whispered to me, "I am afraid to let him out of my sight for fear he should do violence to himself."