"Yes--you have seen what the papers are saying about him, I suppose?

The police are searching for him all over Europe. They have no idea that he is already dead and buried."

"Perhaps it is as well; otherwise the papers would have fallen into their hands. As it is I took possession of them all and restored them to the Italian Emba.s.sy--all but this," and I drew out her letter of appeal, and, opening it, handed it to her.

She glanced at it, crushed it in her hand with a sigh, her dark eyes still fixed upon mine, as though she were trying to read my innermost thoughts.

"Who are your enemies?" I asked in a kindly tone of sympathy. "Tell me, Miss Miller, what have they alleged against you?"

Her brows again contracted. She set her lips hard but remained silent, determined not to satisfy me regarding the charge against her.

I pressed her to speak, but she was firm and quite immovable.

"Now that Nardini is dead I am helpless in the hands of my unscrupulous enemies," was her low, inert answer.

"That letter is best destroyed," I said. Then with murmured thanks she tore it into tiny fragments and scattered it to the wind which carried the pieces away across the wide field of ripe corn.

I told her nothing of the yellow doc.u.ment, that hideous record which Nardini had preserved with her letter.

On the contrary, I implored her pardon for my visit and for my piece of audacious imposture, and, as we walked on together, explained how her father and myself had become friends.

At first she seemed full of fear and suspicion, but gradually, as I gave a full description of how Miller had taken me over the house to see the pictures and antiques, and she saw how enthusiastic I was over the beautiful old place, she became rea.s.sured. Did she know the secret of her father's double life? In any case I could see that she was prepared to go to any length in order to shield him.

"I expect my aunt has been very much puzzled by your card," she said.

"She will probably be wondering whoever you can be."

"If you so desire, Miss Miller, you can explain to your aunt that I am a friend of yours, and that by a mistake of the servant the card was sent to her."

"A most excellent excuse," she laughed. "I'll tell her so, and then if you are still remaining here over to-morrow, perhaps you will call."

"I shall be only too delighted," I a.s.sured her. "Your father I found a most charming man--almost as charming as his daughter."

"Now no compliments please, Mr Leaf," she exclaimed, flushing slightly.

"It is not an idle one, I a.s.sure you," I said. "The compliment is equally to your father as to yourself." And then we strolled forward again along the banks of a small rippling brook overhung by willows and hawthorns. Was it possible that she, so full of grace and sweetness, was actually the woman who Sammy had declared her to be? No, I could not bring myself to believe it. She spoke with such feeling and sympathy, and she was so full of an ineffable charm that I refused to believe that she was a mere adventuress a.s.sisting her father in his direction of some ingenious gang of thieves who worked in secret.

Her father, too, was the very last man whom I should have believed to be an adventurer had not the proof been so plain. Was not that appeal of Lucie's to Nardini an ugly and suspicious truth?

The more suspicious, too, that she would give me no idea of the allegation against her. She evidently feared lest I should make inquiry and discover the disgraceful truth.

Presently, as we came to a bend in the stream where the water was deeper, its unruffled surface shining like a mirror, I halted, and looking straight into her face, said:--

"Miss Miller, yesterday at your house I made a discovery--one that utterly astounded me."

Her countenance went ashen grey.

"A discovery!" she faltered. "What--what do you mean?"

Instantly I saw that I had quite unintentionally alarmed her and hastened to set her at her ease.

"I saw upon a table in your drawing-room the photograph of a very dear friend--Ella Murray. She was your friend, so your father told me. How curious that we should both have been acquainted with her!"

"Oh! Ella! Did you really know poor Ella?" she exclaimed quickly, rea.s.sured that my discovery was not of a compromising character.

"I knew her very well indeed," was my slow response. "When were you acquainted with her?"

"Oh! years ago. We were together at the Sacre Coeur at Evreux, and both left the convent the same year. She was my most intimate friend, and once or twice came with me here, to Studland, when we had our holidays together."

"She actually visited here!" I exclaimed in surprise.

"Several times. Mr Murray was my father's friend. As you know, he lived at Wichenford, in Worcestershire. Then we went to reside entirely abroad, and for quite a long time, a year or more, I lost sight of her.

She was very beautiful. From a child her wonderful face was everywhere admired. In the convent we girls nicknamed her `The Little Madonna,'

for she bore a striking likeness to the Van Dyck's Madonna in the Pitti in Florence, a copy of which hung in the convent chapel."

"Ah, of course!" I cried. Now that she recalled that picture, I recognised the extraordinary likeness. Perhaps you, who read this chronicle of strange facts, know that small canvas a foot square which hangs in a corner of one of the great gold-ceilinged salons, almost unnoticed save by the foreign art enthusiast. The expression of sweetness and adoration distinguishes it as a marvellous work. "What do you know further concerning her?" I asked. "Tell me all--for she was my friend."

"About a year before we went to live at Enghien, near Paris, Mrs Murray died. Then her father let Wichenford Place to an American, and went to Australia for a sea-trip, leaving Ella in charge of an old aunt who lived in London. I saw her once, at her aunt's house in Porchester Terrace. She was very unhappy, and when I asked her the reason she told me in bitter tears that she loved a man who adored her in return. She would not tell me the man's name, but only said that her father and her aunt were compelling her to marry a wealthy elderly man who was odious, and whom she hated. Poor little Ella! I pitied her, and tried to comfort her, but it was quite useless, for that very evening her father, who was then back in London, compelled her to go out and meet her secret lover and give him his _conge_. Who he was or what became of him I do not know. I only know that she loved him as dearly as any woman has ever loved a man--poor little Ella!"

I stood before her motionless, listening to those words. Was this true?

Had Fate any further shaft of bitterness to thrust into my already broken heart?

"Miss Miller!" I managed to exclaim, in a very low voice I fear, "what you tell me is utterly astounding. You know the man who loved Ella Murray. He was none other than myself--I who loved her, ay better than my own life--I who received that dismissal from the sweet lips that I so adored--the lips that I now know were compelled to lie to me."

"You--Mr Leaf!" she cried. "Impossible. You were actually Ella's secret lover!"

"Ah, yes! G.o.d alone knows how I have suffered all these years," I said, half-choked. "You were her friend, Miss Miller, therefore you will forgive me if even to-day I wear my heart upon my sleeve. You will say, perhaps, that I am foolish, yet when a man loves a woman honestly, as I did, and he craves for affection and happiness, the catastrophe of parting is a very severe one--often more so to the man than to the woman. But," I added quickly, "pardon me, I am talking to you as though you were as old as myself. You, at your age, have never experienced the bitterness of a blighted love."

"Unfortunately I have," she answered, in a low, trembling voice. "I, too, loved once--and only once. But, alas! after a few short weeks of affection, of a bliss that I thought would last always, the man I loved was cruelly s.n.a.t.c.hed from me for ever." And she sighed and tears welled in her fine eyes, as she looked aimlessly straight before her--her mind filled with painful recollections.

She told me no more, and left me wondering at the secret love romance that, to my great surprise, seemed to have already hardened her young heart.

Every girl, even in her school years, has her own little affair of the heart, generally becoming hopelessly infatuated with some man much her senior, who is in ignorance of the burning he is awakening within the girlish breast. But hers was, I distinguished, a real serious affection, one which, like my own, had ended in black grief and tragedy.

But she had told me one truth--a ghastly truth. I had misjudged my dear dead love! She had still loved me--she had still been mine--in heart my own!

CHAPTER TWELVE.

IN WHICH A STRANGE THING HAPPENS.

"If your love has ended in tragedy, as mine has done, then we can surely sympathise with each other, Miss Miller," I said, looking into her tearful eyes. "You know well how I have suffered. I believed that Ella really preferred that man to myself, and what you have now told me amazes me. I believed that she was false to me--and yet you tell me that she was true. Ah! how dearly I loved her! I do not believe that any man ever loved a woman so fondly, and with such fierce pa.s.sion as I did. I was hers--body and soul. My love for her was that deep, all-consuming affection which sometimes makes a man as wax in a woman's hands--to be moulded for good or for evil as she wills it. I lost all count of time, of friends, of everything, for I lived only for her. The hours when we were parted were to me like years, her words were music, her smiles the sunlight of my life, her sighs the shadows, her kisses the ecstatic bliss of terrestrial paradise in which I lived. Ah! yes, you who have loved and lost can well understand all that her love meant to me--you can understand why one dark foggy night I stood upon Charing Cross platform and swore an oath that never again would I put foot in the country which, though my native land, held for me only a poignant memory."

"Yes," she answered, with a slight sigh, "I quite understand how you must have suffered. Yet how strange it is that you should actually have been Ella's lover--the man who she declared to me was the only one she would ever love. I did not know you, of course, yet I sympathised with you when she told me that she was going that evening to meet you, and to lie to you under compulsion."

"But why--why did she consent to do this?" I asked.

"She confessed to me the reason. She spoke in confidence, but now that it is all past, I may surely tell you. The fact was that her father, owing to the great depreciation in the value of land, had got into the hands of the Jews, and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Blumenthal, who had lent him a large sum upon mortgage, had offered to return the deeds on the day that he married Ella."

"Then she actually sacrificed herself to save her father!" I cried.