"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 Rivière'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 Côte 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."

Rivière remembered that he himself had cleared £50,000 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. Still, he felt compelled, almost against
his will, to defend his past action.