CHAPTER VII.


MYSTERY BEGINS

The discerning reader will perhaps think Mr. Thomas Larcher a very dull
person in not having yet put this and that together and associated the
love-affair of Murray Davenport with the "romance" of Miss Florence
Kenby. One might suppose that Edna Hill's friendship for Miss Kenby, and
her inquisitiveness regarding Davenport, formed a sufficient pair of
connecting links. But the still more discerning reader will probably
judge otherwise. For Miss Hill had many friends whom she brought to
Larcher's notice, and Miss Kenby did not stand alone in his observation,
as she necessarily does in this narrative. Larcher, too, was not as fully
in possession of the circumstances as the reader. Nor, to him, were the
circumstances isolated from the thousands of others that made up his
life, as they are to the reader. Edna's allusion to Miss Kenby's
"romance" had been cursory; Larcher understood only that she had given
up a lover to please her father. Davenport's inconstant had abandoned
him because he was unlucky; Larcher had always conceived her as such a
woman, and so of a different type from that embodied in Miss Kenby. To
be sure, he knew now that Davenport's fickle one had a father; but so
had most young women. In short, the small connecting facts had no such
significance in his mind, where they were not grouped away from other
facts, as they must have in these pages, where their very presence
together implies inter-relation.