CHAPTER VII.

PERSONAL TO PHIL.

Philip Winslade had been educated at the Iselford Grammar School, whence he had gone, with a scholarship, to Cambridge. As he did not conceive himself adapted for either the Church or the Bar, after taking his degree he had cast about for an opening in a tutorial capacity by way of making a start in life. This he had not been long in finding in the family of a certain Mr. Layland, a wealthy London merchant, who engaged him to take charge of the education of his two sons--backward boys who had been spoiled by their mother, lately dead. Under Phil's supervision the lads soon began to make marked progress, and Mr. Layland had every reason to congratulate himself on his choice.

It was when his engagement with the merchant was about two years old that, as a matter of curiosity and more in order to kill a few idle hours than with any ulterior purpose, he took up and began to study the details of a recent mysterious robbery of bonds and securities of which his employer had been the victim, and which had baffled all the efforts of policedom to bring the criminals to justice. As it was, Winslade presently found that the task he had taken in hand had an absorbing interest for him, as also that it brought into play a certain faculty of analysis of the possession of which he had been only half conscious before, as well as a gift for the sifting of contradictory evidence and the marshalling in orderly sequence of a complicated array of apparently disconnected details, thereby enabling him to build up a theory which indicated how and where the missing clue should be looked for. The result was that Winslade succeeded in doing that which Scotland Yard had failed to effect. As a consequence, his success got talked about in certain City circles, and, a little later, he was asked to take another case in hand which so far had proved to be as great a puzzle as the previous one. Here again Phil was successful in evolving a clue which in the result proved to be the right one.

Such was Mr. Layland's belief in his tutor's abilities that when Phil's engagement came to an end, in consequence of the departure of his pupils for a public school, the merchant requested him to go to the States and there carry out a certain diplomatic business commission which, for reasons of his own, he did not care to entrust to any recognised member of his staff. It was while on his voyage back to England that he encountered Miss Sudlow and her aunt, and thereby brought about a crisis in the affairs of Fanny and himself such as had entered into the dreams of neither.

So unwilling was Mr. Layland to dispense with Phil's services that on his return from America he offered him an influential position in his counting-house at a liberal salary to start with, and with a promise of promotion before he should be much older. But tempting as the offer was in some ways, Phil, feeling that he had neither liking nor aptitude for a commercial career, found himself compelled to decline it. As the next best thing the merchant could do for his _protégé_, he recommended him to his friend Mr. Robert Melray, who just then happened to be in need of the services of a secretary and amanuensis.

Mr. Melray had lately returned from an expedition into the interior of Borneo, and Winslade's duties consisted chiefly in transcribing his diary, together with a miscellaneous collection of notes written in all sorts of places and under all sorts of circumstances, and in working up the whole into a connected narrative of travel with a view to its proximate publication in volume form.

Winslade, working at his employer's rooms in London, had only been engaged a few weeks at his new duties when news came to hand of the tragic and mysterious death of Mr. James Melray. Robert Melray at once hurried down to Merehampton, and Phil was left to go on with his task alone.

One day, about a month later, Robert Melray being up in town for the first time since his brother's death, seized the opportunity to call on his friend Mr. Layland. Naturally their talk gravitated to the strange circumstances connected with the death of the elder Mr. Melray, the younger brother deploring in forcible terms the fact that, despite his offer of a reward of five hundred pounds, so far not the slightest clue to the perpetrator of the crime was forthcoming. Then it was that Mr. Layland brought Winslade's name on the carpet, instancing the able way in which he had succeeded in tracking down the criminals in the case of the bond robbery, as also in the second case he had taken in hand, and strongly advising his friend to induce Phil to take up the affair _sub rosâ_ and see what _he_ could make of it. Robert Melray, who was ready to catch at the slightest straw in his burning desire to bring his brother's murderer to justice, did not fail to act on the merchant's advice. He went direct to Winslade, told him what he had heard with reference to his abilities in a certain line, and begged of him, as a great favour, to take the Loudwater Case in hand and bring all his efforts to bear on its unravelment.

It was not without reluctance that Phil acceded to his employer's request. He had a strong objection to being regarded in the light of a private detective, but the circumstances of the affair being such as they were, it would have seemed a very ungracious act on his part to refuse his aid, whether it might prove worth much or little, in the elucidation of the mystery of James Melray's death.

Accordingly, a few hours later found him at Merehampton duly installed in Loudwater House in the position of Mr. Robert Melray's amanuensis. Not a syllable was breathed to anyone that any ulterior motive was at the bottom of his sojourn under the roof of the old mansion.

But, as we have already seen, all Winslade's efforts proved, as those of the police had already done, wholly unavailing to trace the assassin of James Melray. The mystery baffled him as it had baffled them, and at the end of a month he went back to London no wiser in one respect than he had left it. A month or two later his services with Mr. Melray came to an end.

While he was taking a brief holiday and considering in what way he could best put to account such talents and experience as he possessed, a communication reached him from Mr. Layland. That gentleman was the chief promoter, financially, of a new weekly newspaper which was on the eve of making its appearance, and he was good enough to offer Phil an appointment on the staff. It was an offer which was gratefully accepted. The new venture proved to be a success from every point of view. Phil was still engaged on it, and was likely to be so for an indefinite time to come. He had at length found the _métier_ which seemed best suited to his tastes and abilities, and that of itself ought to afford a large measure of content to any reasonable being.

A close correspondence had been kept up all this time between himself and Miss Sudlow. Only twice had they met, and that for an hour only on each occasion. Miss Mawby, the semi-invalid to whom Fanny filled the office of companion, as a rule detested London, but there were times when she was seized by an irresistible longing to do a day's shopping at the West-end, on which occasions she would rush up to town from wherever she might be, dragging Fanny with her, only to go back, exhausted and worn out, a couple of days later. On two such occasions it was that Fanny and her lover had contrived to meet.

Philip Winslade had never felt quite the same man from the date of his mother's confession. It seemed to him as if he had grown half-a-dozen years older in the course of the first few hours after he was told. Circumstances had forced him to confront the skeleton which for long years had been his mother's companion, and it seemed to him that its grisly presence would haunt him till the last day of his life. With it ever in the background, only felt to be there while he was mixing among the crowd of his fellowmen, but intruding itself as a ghastly reality on his hours of solitude, a measure of that sunshine which his life's morning had heretofore held had vanished, never to return. It was only his supreme love for Fanny which strengthened him and nerved him to oppose with all the power of his will the insidious encroachment of that baleful shadow which, but for that, would have gradually enfolded him in its chill embrace, and have darkened the issues of his life through all the years to come.

We now come to the date of the letter written by Fanny to her lover, the contents of which are already known to the reader. That letter was answered to the following effect a week later.