“But how long will it be before I can see him
again?”
“Ah! That I cannot tell. There is
a mystery underlying it all that even I cannot fathom,
Miss Ranscomb.”
“What kind of mystery?”
The white cavalier shrugged his shoulders.
“You must ask Mr. Henfrey. Or perhaps his
friend Brock knows. Yet if he does, I do not
suppose he would disclose anything his friend may have
told him in confidence.”
“I am bewildered!” the girl declared.
“It is all so very mysterious—Hugh
a fugitive from justice! I—I really
cannot believe it! What can the mystery be?”
“Of that I have no means of ascertaining, Miss
Ranscomb. I am here merely to tell you what has
happened and to give you in secret the name and address
to which to send a letter to him,” the masked
man said very politely. “And now I think
we must part. Perhaps if ever we meet again—which
is scarcely probable—you will recognize
my voice. And always recollect that should you
or Mr. Henfrey ever receive a message from ‘Silverado’
it will be from myself.” And he spelt the
name.
“Silverado. Yes, I shall not forget you,
my mysterious friend.”
“Au revoir!” he said as, bowing
gracefully, he turned and left her.
The sun was rising from the sea when Dorise entered
her bedroom at the hotel. Her maid had retired,
so she undressed herself, and putting on a dressing-gown,
she pulled up the blinds and sat down to write a letter
to Hugh.
She could not sleep before she had sent him a reassuring
message.
In the frenzy of her despair she wrote one letter
and addressed it, but having done so she changed her
mind. It was not sufficiently reassuring, she
decided. It contained an element of doubt.
Therefore she tore it up and wrote a second one which
she locked safely in her jewel case, and then pulled
the blinds and retired.
It was nearly noon next day before she left her room,
yet almost as soon as she had descended in the lift
the head femme de chambre, a stout Frenchwoman
in a frilled cap, entered the room, and walking straight
to the waste-paper basket gathered up the contents
into her apron and went back along the corridor with
an expression of satisfaction upon her full round
face.
CONCERNS THE SPARROW
With the rosy dawn rising behind them the big dusty
car tore along over the white road which led through
Pegli and Cornigliano, with their wealth of olives
and palms, into the industrial suburbs of old-world
Genoa. Then, passing around by the port, the driver
turned the car up past Palazzo Doria and along that
street of fifteenth-century palaces, the Via Garibaldi,
into the little piazza in front of the Annunziata
Church.
There he pulled up after a run of two hours from the
last of the many railway crossings, most of which
they had found closed.
