CHAPTER XXV.
It did not take more than five minutes to cover the distance between Sunnington Crescent and the modest little house where Captain Morrison and his daughter lived; so in a very brief time Cleek had the satisfaction of interviewing both.
Narkom's assertion, that Miss Morrison was "half out of her mind over the distressing affair" had prepared him to encounter a weeping, red-eyed, heart-broken creature of the most excitable type.

He found instead a pale, serious-faced, undemonstrative girl of somewhat uncertain age--sweet of voice, soft of step, quiet of demeanour--who was either one of those persons who repress all external evidence of internal fires, and bear their crosses in silence, or was as cold-blooded as a fish and as heartless as a statue.

He found the father the exact antithesis of the daughter, a nervous, fretful, irritable individual (gout had him by the heels at the time), who was as full of "yaps" and snarls as any Irish terrier, and as peevish and fussy as a fault-finding old woman.

Added to this, he had a way of glancing all round the room, and avoiding the eye of the person to whom he was talking.

And if Cleek had been like the generality of people, and hadn't known that some of the best and "straightest" men in the world have been afflicted in this manner, and some of the worst and "crookedest" could look you straight in the eyes without turning a hair, he might have taken this for a bad sign.