It was Moore, of course, who first made friends, beginning with the younger boy, and Mrs Payne, the mother, speedily followed it up by thanking us for some little kindness we happened to show her son.
"It is so dull for him here," she said, "as his brother is not able to do much. I almost wish we had left him at home at school. But it would have been dreary for him at Christmas--his father and my eldest son are such terribly busy people. Lawyers generally are, I suppose--and we hoped that Leo would have some chance of improving his French here, as he is going to a public school at Easter."
Mother confided to her in return Moore's prospects. Mrs Payne was a gentle, rather childish woman, of the type whom very clever men are often credited with preferring as wives, and we soon came to the conclusion that the old saying was exemplified in the present case. The sons, the elder one in particular, were decidedly intelligent above the average, and their admiration for their father and elder brother fully equalled that of their mother. Rupert, the invalid, took a great fancy to me, and before long I was the recipient of many of his secret hopes and aspirations, the most intense of which was that he should become a novelist.
"You see, Miss Fitzmaurice," he said to me one day, "I have already, and would have increasingly, material ready to my hand. You don't know what extraordinary stories lawyers come across! Many of them there is no breach of confidence in repeating, and my brother Clarence has told me bits of others quite as strange as any fiction."
"Or stranger," I remarked, for at that moment Isabel's description of the Grim House and its inhabitants came into my mind.
"Yes," said Rupert, "you are right. Some stories are `too strange not to be true.' And you see I could piece bits together, so that nobody could possibly recognise anything. My father knows _one_ story which he says he can't tell us--I believe he says so partly to tantalise us-- which he declares would make a first-rate sensational novel."
"And will he never be able to tell it to you?" I inquired, more for the sake of seeming interested in poor Rupert's conversation than because I cared to hear. The young fellow was rather of the "old-fashioned" order; there was a certain quaintness in his way of speaking which was not without its charm, though now and then he tired my patience a little. He was so unlike anything of "boy" kind I had ever come across.