Mirabelle sat down on the bed, for the moment too astonished to speak. Her own financial position was no mystery. She had been left sufficient to bring her in a small sum yearly, and with the produce of the farm had managed to make both ends meet. It was the failure of the farm as a source of profit which had brought her to her new job in London. Alma had also a small annuity; the farm was the girl’s property, but beyond these revenues she had nothing. There was not even a possibility that she was an heiress. Her father had been a comparatively poor man, and had been supported in his numerous excursions to various parts of the world in search of knowledge by the scientific societies to which he was attached; his literary earnings were negligible; his books enjoyed only a very limited sale. She could trace her ancestry back for seven generations; knew of her uncles and aunts, and they did not include a single man or woman who, in the best traditions of the story-books, had gone to America and made an immense fortune. “It is absurd,” she said. “I have no money. If Mr. Oberzohn puts me up to ransom, it will have to be something under a hundred!” “Put you up to ransom?” said Joan. “I don’t get you there. But you’re rich all right—I can tell you that. Monty says so, and Monty wouldn’t lie to me.” Mirabelle was bewildered. It seemed almost impossible that a man of Oberzohn’s intelligence and sources of information could make such a mistake. And yet Joan was earnest. “They must have mistaken me for somebody else,” she said, but Joan did not answer. She was sitting up in a listening attitude, and her eyes were directed towards the iron door which separated their sleeping apartment from the larger vault. She had heard the creak of the trap turning and the sound of feet coming down the stairs. Mirabelle rose as Oberzohn came in. He wore his black dressing-gown, his smoking-cap was at the back of his head, and the muddy Wellington boots which he had pulled over his feet looked incongruous, and would at any other time have provoked her to laughter. He favoured her with a stiff nod. “You have slept well, gracious lady?” he said, and to her amazement took her cold hand in his and kissed it. She felt the same feeling of revulsion and unreality as had overcome her that night at the dance when Gurther had similarly saluted her. “It is a nice place, for young people and for old.” He looked round the apartment with satisfaction. “Here I should be content to spend my life reading my books, and giving my mind to thought, but”—he spread his hands and shrugged—“what would you? I am a business man, with immense interests in every part of the world. I am rich, too, beyond your dreams! I have stores in every part of the world, and thousands of men and women on my pay-roll.” Why was he telling her all this, she wondered, reciting the facts in a monotonous voice. Surely he had not come down to emphasize the soundness of his financial position?