"No; I don't know her, Bertie! but I knew her mother and father very well many years ago."
Nothing would satisfy him but that I should ask to see her when I left the hospital, and as he seemed really anxious on the point I promised to do so, though inwardly averse from disturbing a busy woman.
I asked the hall porter for her, but said I had no special business, and would not ask to see her unless she happened to be quite free. In a few moments he returned, and showed me into a pretty sitting-room on the ground floor, saying that the sister would be with me shortly. The door opened again to admit a bright, pleasant-looking young woman of seven or eight and twenty, who gave me a most cordial greeting when she heard my name, saying: "Oh yes, Frank told me all about meeting you at Oxford."
I did not feel very keen about talking of "Frank" just then; but we sat down, and had a long half hour's chat on much the same lines as my conversation with her brother three years before.
I had said good-bye, and she had accompanied me across the hall to the fine stone steps leading from the hospital--she had, in fact, turned towards her own apartments--when I felt I _must_ ask her one more question, so I also turned, and hurried back to her.
"Did your brother Frank ever tell you of a letter he received from me in Oxford?" I asked.
"Oh yes," she answered, without a touch of embarrassment.
Then I continued: "I never heard from him about it. I told him he need not write at the time, but I have been afraid he was hurt or annoyed, and thought it an impertinence on my part perhaps."
"Did Frank never write?" she asked, with genuine astonishment. "I know he intended to do so. Certainly he was not annoyed in any way. Far from it. He was intensely interested, and _I have the best of reasons for knowing that that message from our mother made a very great difference in his life_."
I thanked her for these words, without asking anything further. As I have said, it was no affair of mine, from first to last; but the verification, after such a lapse of time, was doubly satisfactory to me.
Again I ask: How about the "_Cui Bono_" argument?
Another shake of the kaleidoscope, and I find myself at Wimbledon, staying with a friend--now, alas! passed away--who had then a pretty house not far from the Common, and with whom I often spent a few days when in London.