"Which friends?" he asked.
"I don't know which friends. But there's an advertisement in a Paris
paper asking for your whereabouts."
"Thank you for letting me know. What does it say?"
She produced the cutting and handed it to him. He studied it in silence.
There was no hint in its wording as to who was making inquiry--the
advertisement merely asked for replies to be sent to a box number care
of the journal. It struck Riviere that it must have been inserted by
Olive.
"Thank you," he said. "I hadn't seen it before."
"I'm going to ask something in return," said Elaine, and smiled at him
frankly. "I want to know why you're running away from your Monte Carlo
friends."
Most women of Riviere's world would have cloaked their curiosity under
some conventional, indirect form of question. Her frank directness
struck him as refreshing, and he answered readily: "The lady you saw in
the Cote d'Azur Rapide was my sister-in-law, Mrs Matheson. Mrs Clifford
Matheson."
"The wife of that man!" she interrupted. There was anger and contempt in
her voice.
"You know him?"
"My father lost the last remains of his money in one of that man's
companies. It hastened his death."
"Which company?"
"The Saskatchewan Land Development Co. My father bought during the early
boom in the shares."
Riviere remembered that he himself had cleared L50,000 over the
flotation, and the remembrance jarred on him. The company was a
moderately successful one, but in its early days the shares had been
"rigged" to an unreal figure.
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