She was quite calm now, and I had a good look at her. She was certainly plain. Her face was sharp and thin, and her eyes were a dull, dark color. She was undersized and ungraceful, in addition to which she was dressed much too richly for traveling, and in questionable taste. So far as I could recollect there was not the slightest resemblance between her and the dead man. She surprised me in the middle of my scrutiny, but she did not seem to notice it. She had evidently been thinking something out. “You have not lived here very long, Miss Ffolliot?” she asked, “have you?” I shook my head. “Only a month or so.” “I suppose,” she continued, “you know the names of most of the principal families round here. A good many of them would call upon you, no doubt?” “I believe I know most of them, by name at any rate,” I told her. “Do you know any family of the name of Maltabar?” she asked--”particularly a man called Philip Maltabar?” I shook my head at once with a sense of relief which I could not altogether conceal. “No, I never heard it in my life,” I answered. “I am quite sure that there is no family of that name of any consequence around here. I must have heard it, and it is too uncommon a one to be overlooked.” The brief light died out of her face. She was evidently disappointed. “You are quite sure?” “Absolutely certain.” She sighed. “I am sorry,” she said. “Philip Maltabar is the one man I know who hated my brother. There has been a terrible and lifelong enmity between them. It has lasted since they were boys. I believe that it was to avoid him that my brother first went to South America. If there had been a Maltabar living anywhere around here I should have known where to go for vengeance.” “Is it well to think of that, and so soon?” I asked, quietly. The girl’s aspect had changed. I looked away from her with a little shudder. “What else is there for me to think of?” she demanded. “Supposing it were you, it would be different. You have other relatives. I have none. I am left alone in the world. My brother may have had his faults, but to me he was everything. Can you wonder that I hate the person who has deprived me of him?” “You are not sure--it is not certain that there was not an accident--that he did not kill himself,” I suggested. She dismissed the idea with scorn.