'She is a very charming woman,' replied Mr. Semple, 'and she used to know your mother long ago in Spain.' Peter took his cigar out of his mouth, and turned interrogatively towards the lawyer. 'I don't suppose she was able to tell you anything?' he said, with a sharp note of interest in his voice. 'She was able to tell me nothing,' said Mr. Semple, 'except a woman's impression of a conversation she had with a Spanish serving-woman.' 'I should like to hear all she had to say,' said Peter briefly. 'Ships sailing for Argentine stop at Lisbon and take up passengers there,' said Mr. Semple. 'I have been to Lisbon since I last saw you. Mrs. Ogilvie paid the passage-money for a married couple and a child who sailed from that place in December of the year in which your brother is said to have died.' CHAPTER IX 'I think I 'll go over and see Toffy,' said Peter to himself one day in the following week. Mr. Semple had been down to Bowshott again, bringing a mass of correspondence with him, and had left that morning. Nigel Christopherson was ill at Hulworth with one of his usual appalling colds, which brought him as nearly as possible to the grave every time they attacked him. Peter once again read through the letters and papers which he and the family lawyer had pored over until the small hours of this morning, and then he ordered his horse and rode over to see his friend. No one ever arrived at Hulworth without remarking on the almost grotesque ugliness of the house. It was a flat-faced, barrack-like residence, with a stuccoed front and rows of ill-designed windows. A grim-looking flight of stone stairs with iron railings led to the front door, and beyond that were large and hideous rooms filled with treasures of art incongruously hung on lamentable wall-papers or pendent over pieces of furniture which would have made a connoisseur's eyes ache. The house and its furnishings were a strange mixture; the owner of the grim pile, be it said, had a mind which presented a blank to the dictates of art, and it puzzled him sorely to determine which of his possessions was beautiful and which was not. He had heard people become enthusiastic over his pictures, which he thought hideous, while they had frankly abused his furniture, which he was inclined to think was everything that was desirable. 'There 's only one way,' he used to say hopelessly, 'in which a fellow can know whether a thing is ugly or the reverse, and that is by fixing a price to it. If only some one would be kind enough to stick on a lot of labels telling me what the things are worth I should know what to admire and what to shudder at; but, as it is, the things which I personally like are always the things which other people abuse.'