Page:Braddon--Wyllard's weird.djvu/191

183 the name of the supposed murderer. He got off so cleverly as to baffle the keenest police in Europe."

"Did you know any thing of him?"

"Nothing. He was a nobody, I believe. A man of ample means, but of no social standing."

"His life was a social mystery; and it is in that mysterious existence that I find an interest surpassing anything I have hitherto met with in the history of crime."

"Really!" exclaimed Julian Wyllard, with something of a sneer in his tone. "I perceive you have begun the business of amateur detective on a large scale. I understood from Dora that you were coming to Paris solely with a view to finding out anything there was to be discovered about that poor little girl who tumbled off the viaduct, and whom, I think, you call Louise Lemarque."

"Léonie Lemarque. That was the girl's name. Léonie Lemarque's death is only the last link in a chain of events beginning with the murder of Marie Prévol."

Julian Wyllard started impatiently from his chair.

"My dear Heathcote, I thought you the most sensible man I ever met, but really this sounds like rank lunacy. What in Heaven's name can the murder at Saint-Germain ten years ago have to do with the death of that girl the other day?"

"Only this much. Léonie Lemarque was Marie Prévol's niece: and I have the strongest reason for believing that she went to London to meet the murderer of her aunt."

Edward Heathcote uttered those words, the conviction of their truth flashed into his mind. In thoughtful days and wakeful nights this question as to the identity of the person who was to meet Léonie Lemarque at the railway-station had been a perplexity to him, the subject of many a new theory: and now it came upon him all at once that this assertion, which he had made on the spur of the moment, in the heat of argument, was the true solution of the mystery.

It was to Georges himself—her daughter's generous adoring lover, her daughter's suspected murderer—that Madame Lemarque had sent her granddaughter, as to one who, of all other men, would be most inclined to act generously to the orphan girl, were it only in remorse for his crime.