Matthew Peel-
Swynnerton felt very queer. He felt like a criminal in peril of
being caught in the act, and he could not understand why he should
feel so. The landlady looked in the 'P' pigeon-hole, and in the
'S' pigeon-hole.
"No," she said quietly, "I see nothing for you."
Taken with a swift rash audacity, he said: "Have you had any one
named Povey here recently?"
"Povey?"
"Yes. Cyril Povey, of Bursley--in the Five Towns."
He was very impressionable, very sensitive, was Matthew Peel-
Swynnerton. His voice trembled as he spoke. But hers also trembled
in reply.
"Not that I remember! No! Were you expecting him to be here?"
"Well, it wasn't at all sure," he muttered. "Thank you. Good-
night."
"Good-night," she said, apparently with the simple perfunctoriness
of the landlady who says good-night to dozens of strangers every
evening.
He hurried away upstairs, and met the portress coming down. "Well,
well!" he thought. "Of all the queer things--!" And he kept
nodding his head. At last he had encountered something REALLY
strange in the spectacle of existence. It had fallen to him to
discover the legendary woman who had fled from Bursley before he
was born, and of whom nobody knew anything.
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