The chain of evidence was growing massive. Supposing, as before, Aunt Em was the cook and Arthur’s aunt, whose was the wailing voice inside? Could it be the lady’s-maid’s or the house-maid’s? Miss Clifford’s masculine intellect decided that it scarcely could. Again, had not she and her sister spent an hour last night in following the history of the Avesham family in Debrett’s Peerage into all its ramifications and collateral branches? “Sons living, Hon. Arthur John Talbot, b. 1873, ed. at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford”--how was it possible for a person of intelligence not to connect the subject of that entry with the person called Arthur who lounged with a pewter pot? The coincidence was too glaring to be overlooked. One thing would settle it, and Miss Clifford cursed her defective memory. If either Lord Avesham or his wife had a “sister living called Emma or Emmaline, that must be the Aunt Em” who had sat so truculently in the highway and been offered beer. Miss Clifford turned quite cold at the thought that she had perhaps been within an ace of running into a sister or a sister-in-law of a peer. What would her mother have said if she had been alive to see such a day? Miss Clifford wasted no more time, but went home like a positive race-horse, arriving in a breathing heat. She went straight to the room called by her and her sister “the libry,” and took the Peerage from its shelf. No, the late Lord Avesham had only one sister living, who was called Lucy, which could not possibly be abbreviated into Em, but he married Frances Mary Fortescue, second daughter of late Mr. John Fortescue. It was but the work of a moment to turn to the Fs in the landed gentry and find John Lewis Fortescue, Esq., son of late John Fortescue, Esq., who had one sister living, Emma Caroline. The thing was as good as proved, and Miss Clifford was practically face to face with the fact that peers (at any rate, the brothers of peers) drank beer in shirts, and that she had nearly run down the sister of a peeress. It had been a most exciting morning, and she waited with weary impatience for the return of her sister, who was out, to pour into her horror-struck ears these revelations about the aristocracy. “No wonder many people turn Radical,” she said to herself.