and talk to me while I get a snack before going to the lawyers.”
A few minutes later they were seated in a Strand restaurant, and the young Scotsman heard all about his friend’s struggles with the demon of poverty in New York, but never a word of the trouble that was brooding. In his turn Forsyth was able to fill in the blanks of the family solicitor’s cablegram, and enlightened Beaumanoir as to the manner of his succession to the title. The late Duke was traveling to Newmarket in a racing “special,” accompanied by his nephew and heir, George Hanbury, when they had both met their deaths in a collision.
The double funeral had taken place at Prior’s Tarrant, the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Beaumanoir in Hertfordshire, three days before, the arrangements having been made by the solicitors, in the absence of the next successor. The last Duke having been a childless widower, and both his brothers, the fathers respectively of George and Charles Hanbury, having predeceased him, there had been no near relatives to follow the late head of the house to his last resting-place.
“Let me see, my cousin George had a sister,
[40]
