fancy not,” said the agent. “In fact, I think I can say undoubtedly not. She was not engaged before the death of her sister, I am certain; and this disaster of her sister appears to have inspired the poor girl with such a detestation of the whole male sex – ”
“Do you happen to know who a certain Mr. Van Hupfeldt is?” asked David.
“Van Hupfeldt, Van Hupfeldt? No, never heard of him. What of him?”
“He seems to be a pretty close friend of the Mordaunts, if I am right.”
“He may be a close friend, and yet a new one,” said Dibbin, “as sometimes happens. Never heard of him, although I thought that I knew the names of most of Mrs. Mordaunt’s connections, either through herself or her solicitors.”
“But to go back to this Strauss,” said David. “Do you mean to say that neither the mother nor Miss Mordaunt ever once saw him?”
“Not once that they know of.”
“Then, how did he get hold of Gwendoline?”
“That’s the question. It is suspected that he met her in the hunting-field, persuaded her to meet him secretly, and finally won her to fly from home. To me this is quite credible; for I’ve seen Johann Strauss twice, and each time have been struck with the thought how fascinating this man must be in the eyes of a young woman!”
“What was he like, then, this Mr. Johann Strauss of the flourishy signature?”
“A most handsome young man,” said Mr. Dibbin, impressively; “hard to describe exactly. Came from the States, I think, or had lived there – had just a touch of the talk, perhaps – of Dutch extraction, I take it. Handsome fellow, handsome fellow; the kind of man girls throw themselves over precipices after: teeth flashing between the wings of his black mustache – tall, thin man, always most elegantly dressed – dark skin – sallow – ”
At that word “sallow,” David started, the description of Johann Strauss had so strangely reminded him of Van Hupfeldt! But the thought that the cause of the one sister’s undoing should be friendly with the other sister, paying his court to her over the grave of the ill-fated dead, was too wild to find for itself a place all at once in the mind.
David frowned down the notion of such a horror. He told himself that it was dark when he had seen Van Hupfeldt, that there were many tall men with white teeth and black mustaches, and sallow, dark skins. If he had felt some sort of antipathy to Van Hupfeldt at first sight, this was no proof of evil in Van Hupfeldt’s nature, but a proof only, perhaps, of David’s capabilities of being jealous of one more favored than himself by nature as he fancied – and by Violet Mordaunt, which was the notion that rankled.
And yet he tingled. Dibbin had said that this Van Hupfeldt might be “a new friend – one who had become a friend since the death of Gwendoline.”
David paced the room with slow steps, and while Dibbin talked on of one or another of the people who had known Gwendoline Mordaunt in the flesh, vowed to himself that he would take this matter on his shoulders and see it through.
“Speaking of the Miss L’Estrange who was in the flat before me,” said he; “how long did she stay in it?”
“Three months, nearly,” answered Dibbin, “and then all of a sudden she wouldn’t stay another day. And I had no means of forcing her to do so either.”
“What? Did the ghost suddenly get worse?”
“I couldn’t quite tell you what happened. Miss Ermyn L’Estrange isn’t a lady altogether easy to understand when in an excited condition. Suffice it to say, she wouldn’t stay another hour, and went off with a noise like a catherine-wheel.”
“Quite so. But I say, Dibbin, can you give me the address of the lady?”
“With pleasure,” said the agent, in whom brandy and soda acted as a solvent. “I am a man, Mr. Harcourt, with three hundred and odd addresses in my head, I do assure you. But, then, Miss L’Estrange is a bird of passage – ”
“All right, just write down the address that you know; and there is one other address that I want, Mr. Dibbin – that of the girl who acted as help to Miss Gwendoline Mordaunt.”
Dibbin had known this address also, and with the promise to see if he could find it among his papers – for it was he who had recommended the girl – went away. He was hardly gone when Harcourt, who did not let the grass grow under his feet, put on hat and coat, and started out to call upon Miss Ermyn L’Estrange.
CHAPTER V
VON OR VAN?
The address of Miss L’Estrange, given to David by Dibbin, was in King’s Road, Chelsea, and thither David set out, thinking in his cab of that word “papers,” of the oddness of Violet’s question at the grave: “What have you done with my sister’s papers?”
Whatever papers might be meant, it was hardly to be supposed that Miss L’Estrange knew aught of them, yet he hoped for information from her, since a tenant next in order is always likely to have gathered many bits of knowledge about the former tenant.
As for his right to pry and interfere, that, he assured himself, was a settled thing. Going over in his mind Violet’s words and manner in the cemetery, he came to the conclusion that she was half inclined to suspect that he was her sister’s destroyer, who had now taken the flat for some vaguely evil reason, perhaps to seek, or to guard from her, those very papers for which she so craved. Had she never heard, he wondered, that her sister’s evil mate was a man with a black mustache and pale, dark skin? Perhaps, if she ever had, she would suspect – some one else than he! That would be strange enough, her suspicion of the innocent, if at the same time the guilty was at her side, unsuspected! But David tried to banish from his mind the notion that Van Hupfeldt might possibly be Johann Strauss.
At Chelsea he was admitted to a flat as cozily dim as his own, but much more frivolously crowded with knickknacks; nor had he long to wait until Miss L’Estrange, all hair and paint, dashed in. It was near one in the afternoon, but she had an early-morning look of rawness and déshabillement, as if she had just risen from bed. Her toilet was incomplete. Her face had the crude look of a water-color daub by a school-girl; her whirl of red hair swept like a turban about her head.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“I am sorry – ” began David.
“Cut the excuses,” said Miss Ermyn L’Estrange. She had a reputation for bruskness which passed for wit in her set.
“I am the occupant of the flat in Eddystone Mansions which you recently left.”
“I hope you like it.”
“I like it fairly well, as a flat.”
“What? Not seen anything?”
“No. Anything of what nature?”
“Anything ghostified?” she snapped, sitting with her chin on her palm, her face poked forward close to David’s, while the sleeve fell away from her thin forearm. She had decided that he was an interesting young man.
“I have seen no ghost,” he said. “I don’t believe I ever shall see one.”
“There are ghosts,” she said; “so it’s no good
