Since then they had met almost daily and taken tea together. Once Jim had asked her to go to a theatre, an invitation which she had promptly but kindly declined. Thereafter he had made no further attempt to improve their acquaintance.
“And how have you got on with your search for the missing lady?” she asked, as she spread some jam on the thin bread-and-butter which the waitress had brought.
Jim’s nose wrinkled—a characteristic grimace of his.
“Mr. Salter made it clear to me today that even if I found the missing lady it wouldn’t greatly improve matters,” he said.
“It would be wonderful if the child had been saved after all,” she said. “Have you ever thought of that possibility?”
He nodded.
“There is no hope of that,” he said, shaking his head, “but it would be wonderful, as you say, and more wonderful,” he laughed, “if you were the missing heiress!”
“And there’s no hope of that either,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m the daughter of poor but honest parents, as the storybooks say.”
“Your father was a South African, wasn’t he?”
She nodded.
“Poor daddy was a musician, and mother I can hardly remember, but she must have been a dear.”
“Where were you born?” asked Jim.
She did not answer immediately because she was busy with her jam sandwich.
“In Cape Town—Rondebosch, to be exact,” she said after a while. “Why are you so keen on finding your long-lost lady?”
“Because I am anxious that the most unmitigated cad in the world should not succeed to the Danton millions.”
She sat bolt upright.
“The Danton millions?” she repeated slowly. “Then who is your unmitigated cad? You have never yet mentioned the names of these people.”
This was perfectly true. Jim Steele had not even spoken of his search until a few days before.
“A man named Digby Groat.”
She stared at him aghast.
“Why, what’s the matter?” he asked in surprise.
“When you said ‘Danton’ I remembered Mr. Curley—that is our chief photographer—saying that Mrs. Groat was the sister of Jonathan Danton,” she said slowly.
“Do you know the Groats?” he asked quickly.
“I don’t know them,” she said slowly, “at least, not very well, only—” she hesitated, “I’m going to be Mrs. Groat’s secretary.”
He stared at her.
“You never told me this,” he said, and as she dropped her eyes to her plate, he realized that he had made a faux pas. “Of course,” he said hurriedly, “there’s no reason why you should tell me, but—”
“It only happened today,” she said. “Mr. Groat has had some photographs taken—his mother came with him to the studio. She’s been several times, and I scarcely noticed them until today, when Mr. Curley called me into the office and said that Mrs. Groat was in need of a secretary and that it was a very good position; £5 a week, which is practically all profit, because I should live in the house.”
“When did Mrs. Groat decide that she wanted a secretary?” asked Jim, and it was her turn to stare.
“I don’t know. Why do you ask that?”
“She was at our office a month ago,” said Jim, “and Mr. Salter suggested that she should have a secretary to keep her accounts in order. She said then she hated the idea of having anybody in the house who was neither a servant nor a friend of the family.”
“Well, she’s changed her views now,” smiled the girl.
“This means that we shan’t meet at tea any more. When are you going?”
“Tomorrow,” was the discouraging reply.
He went back to his office more than a little dispirited. Something deep and vital seemed to have gone out of his life.
“You’re in love, you fool,” he growled to himself.
He opened the big diary which it was his business to keep and slammed down the covers savagely.
Mr. Salter had gone home. He always went home early, and Jim lit his pipe and began to enter up the day’s transactions from the scribbled notes which his chief had left on his desk.
He had made the last entry and was making a final search of the desk for some scrap which he might have overlooked.
Mr. Salter’s desk was usually tidy, but he had a habit of concealing important memoranda, and Jim turned over the law books on the table in a search for any scribbled memo he might have missed. He found between two volumes a thin gilt-edged notebook, which he did not remember having seen before. He opened it to discover that it was a diary for the year 1901. Mr. Salter was in the habit of making notes for his own private reading, using a queer legal shorthand which no clerk had ever been able to decipher. The entries in the diary were in these characters.
Jim turned the leaves curiously, wondering how so methodical a man as the lawyer had left a private diary visible. He knew that in the big green safe in the lawyer’s office were stacks of these books, and possibly the old man had taken one out to refresh his memory. The writing was Greek to Jim so that he felt no compunction in turning the pages, filled as they were with indecipherable and meaningless scrawls, punctuated now and again with a word in longhand.
He stopped suddenly, for under the heading “June 4th” was quite a long entry. It seemed to have been written in subsequently to the original shorthand entry, for it was in green ink. This almost dated the inscription. Eighteen months before, an oculist had suggested to Mr. Salter, who suffered from an unusual form of astigmatism, that green ink would be easier for him to read, and ever since then he had used no other.
Jim took in the paragraph before he realized that he was committing an unpardonable act in reading his employers’ private notes.
“One month imprisonment with hard labour. Holloway Prison. Released July 2nd. Madge Benson (this word was underlined), 14, Palmer’s Terrace, Paddington. 74, Highcliffe Gardens, Margate. Long enquiries with boatman who owned Saucy Belle. No further trace—”
Here the entry ended.
“What on earth
