She continued the conversation without feeling the slightest interest in it, but simply because it was an escape--a temporary escape--from her thoughts. "What did you come over for?" she asked.
"A fool's errand!" he answered. "I lent a man some money--a sort of speculation it was--and I came over to see how he was getting on."
"And I suppose he'd lost it," she remarked.
"He's lost himself," answered the man, "which is about as bad. I wish I could lay my hands upon him. I'd get a bit of my own back, one way or another."
"London is a big place," she returned. "People are not easy to find unless you know all about them."
"This man left South Africa only a month or so ago. He gave me an address here where he said I should always hear of him. I've been there nearly every day. He turned up there all right regularly after he first landed. He hasn't been there at all for two months, and they haven't the least idea where he is."
"You don't even know," she asked, "whether the speculation is successful or not?"
He shook his head gloomily. "It don't make much odds, so far as I can see," he said. "If it came off, he's bolted with the profits. If it didn't, he's hiding for fear I shall want my money back again. It's a rotten sort of show, anyway."
"His real name," the man answered, "was the same as your own,--that is," he added, "I think I heard old Mrs. Towsley call you Miss Sinclair, didn't I?"
She looked at him steadily for several moments without speaking. He was not a person of quick apprehensions, but even he could not fail to see the change in her face. Her lips were parted, her eyes were suddenly lit with an almost passionate fire. The change in her features was illuminating. She was no longer a tired, depressed-looking young woman of ill-tempered appearance. Her good looks had reasserted themselves. Life seemed to have been breathed into her pulses.
"His real name was Sinclair," she repeated softly. "He came from South Africa. Tell me some more about him?"
"Because," she told him, "my name is Ruby Sinclair, and I am here on very much the same errand as you, only with this difference," she added,--"I know where my uncle is. I know what has become of him. There are other things for which I seek."