‘Oh, indeed!’ Richard remarked sagaciously.
‘Ay!’ said Mr. Puddephatt, filling his pipe, ‘lots o’ tales. That night as she ran away from the farm, and Mrs. Bridget had to fetch her back from the White Horse---- Everybody said as how the old man ill-treated her, daughter or no daughter.’
‘A few weeks back,’ said Mr. Puddephatt laconically.
‘It’s a queer world, Mr. Puddephatt,’ said Richard aloud. To himself he said: ‘Then perhaps she isn’t involved with her father--if he is her father.’
At length they reached the suburbs of London and had to moderate their speed. As they wound in and out through the traffic of Kilburn, Richard’s eye chanced to catch the sign of the British and Scottish Bank. He drew up opposite the mahogany doors of the bank and, leaving Mr. Puddephatt in charge of the car, entered. It was turned ten o’clock. He felt fairly certain that Raphael Craig had not left Queen’s Farm, but he wanted to convince himself that the bank manager was not always so impeccably prompt at business as some people said.
‘I wish to see Mr. Craig,’ he said, just as he had said two hours before to Mrs. Bridget.
‘Mr. Craig,’ said the clerk, ‘is at present taking his annual holiday. He will return to business in a fortnight’s time.’
Richard returned to the car curiously annoyed, with a sense of being baffled. His thoughts ran back to Teresa. Thirty miles of Watling Street now separated them, yet her image was more strenuously before him than it had been at any time since she fainted in the silver-heaped stable on Saturday night.
‘Yes,’ he said to himself positively, ‘I’ll call on Lord Dolmer at once, and tell him I won’t have anything further to do with the affair.’
He dropped Mr. Puddephatt, whose society, he felt, was perhaps growing rather tedious to him, at Oxford Circus, and directed him to an omnibus for the Elephant and Castle.
‘My address is 4, Adelphi Terrace, in case you need a friend in London at any time,’ said Richard.
‘Good-day to ye, sir,’ said Mr. Puddephatt, ‘and thank ye kindly. Shall we be seeing you again at Hockliffe soon?’
‘No,’ said Richard shortly. ‘I am not likely ever to come to Hockliffe. My business there is absolutely concluded.’
They shook hands, full of goodwill. As Mr. Puddephatt’s burly and rustic form faded away into the crowd Richard watched it, and thought how strange, and, indeed, pathetic, it was that two human beings should casually meet, become in a measure intimate, and then part for evermore, lost to each other in the mazy wilderness of an immense civilization.