The Doctor of Pimlico | Page 6

would
rather sacrifice my great love for you than betray the trust I hold most
sacred. So great is my love for you, rather would I never look upon
your dear face again than reveal to you the tragic truth and bring upon
you unhappiness and despair."
"Walter," she replied in a trembling voice, looking straight into his
countenance with those wonderful dark eyes wherein her soul brimmed
over with weary emotion and fatigued passion, "I repeat all that I told
you on that calm night beside the sea. I love you; I think of you day by
day, hour by hour. But you have lied to me, and therefore I hate myself
for having so foolishly placed my trust in you."
He had resolved to preserve his great secret--a secret that none should
know.

"Very well," he sighed, shrugging his shoulders. "These recriminations
are really all useless. Ah, if you only knew the truth, Enid! If I only
dared to reveal to you the hideous facts. But I refuse--they are too
tragic, too terrible. Better that we should part now, and that you should
remain in ignorance--better by far, for you. You believe that I am
deceiving you. Well, I'm frank and admit that I am; but it is with a
distinct purpose--for your own sake."
He held forth his hand, and slowly she took it. In silence he bowed over
it, his lips compressed; then, turning upon his heel, he went down the
gravelled walk back to the hotel, which, some ten minutes later, he left
with Fred Tredennick, catching the train back to Dundee and on to
Perth.
He was in no way a man to wear his heart upon his sleeve, therefore he
chatted gaily with his friend and listened to Fred's extravagant
admiration of Enid's beauty. He congratulated himself that his old
friend was in ignorance of the truth.
A curious incident occurred at the hotel that same evening, however,
which, had Walter been aware of it, would probably have caused him
considerable uneasiness and alarm. Just before seven o'clock a tall,
rather thin, middle-aged, narrow-eyed man, dressed in dark grey tweeds,
entered the hall of the hotel and inquired for Henry, the head waiter. He
was well dressed and bore an almost professional air.
The white-headed old man quickly appeared, when the stranger, whose
moustache was carefully trimmed and who wore a ruby ring upon his
white hand, made an anxious inquiry whether Fetherston, whom he
minutely described, had been there that day. At first the head waiter
hesitated and was uncommunicative, but, the stranger having uttered a
few low words, Henry's manner instantly changed. He started, looked
in wonder into the stranger's face, and, taking him into the
smoking-room--at that moment unoccupied--he allowed himself to be
closely questioned regarding the general and his stepdaughter, as well
as the man who had that day been their guest. The stranger was a man
of quick actions, and his inquiries were sharp and to the point.

"You say that Mr. Fetherston met the young lady outside after luncheon,
and they had an argument in secret, eh?" asked the stranger.
Henry replied in the affirmative, declaring that he unfortunately could
not overhear the subject under discussion. But he believed the pair had
quarrelled.
"And where has Mr. Fetherston gone?" asked his keen-eyed questioner.
"He is, I believe, the guest of Major Tredennick, who lives on the other
side of Perthshire at Invermay on Loch Earn."
"And the young lady goes back to Hill Street with her stepfather, eh?"
"On Wednesday."
"Good!" was the stranger's reply. Then, thanking the head waiter for the
information in a sharp, businesslike voice, and handing him five
shillings, he took train back from Monifieth to Dundee, and went direct
to the chief post-office.
From there he dispatched a carefully constructed cipher telegram to an
address in the Boulevard Anspach, in Brussels, afterwards lighting an
excellent cigar and strolling along the busy street with an air of
supreme self-satisfaction.
"If this man, Fetherston, has discovered the truth, as I fear he has
done," the hard-faced man muttered to himself, "then by his action
to-day he has sealed his own doom!--and Enid Orlebar herself will
silence him!"
CHAPTER III
INTRODUCES DOCTOR WEIRMARSH
THREE days had elapsed.
In the dingy back room of a dull, drab house in the Vauxhall Bridge

Road, close to Victoria Station in London, the narrow-eyed man who
had so closely questioned old Henry at the Panmure Hotel, sat at an old
mahogany writing-table reading a long letter written upon thin foreign
notepaper.
The incandescent gas-lamp shed a cold glare across the room. On one
side of the smoke-grimed apartment was a shabby leather couch, on the
other side a long nest of drawers, while beside the fireplace was an
expanding gas-bracket placed in