Page:Burton Stevenson--The marathon mystery.djvu/256

230 “Just that!” he said, and shot me a triumphant glance. “Let us see if you can catch it. The clipping is in French, and though my French isn’t of the highest order, I can get the sense of it pretty well. It is dated Suresnes, and is evidently a letter from a provincial correspondent to a Paris newspaper, who like most other provincial correspondents, is delightfully vague. However, I gather from it that on the night of September 16, 1891, a beautiful young English girl—name not given—ran away from the convent school of the Sacred Heart at Suresnes and that the next morning she was safely married to a ‘gallant Frenchman’—Tremaine, of course—by the curé of the little village of Petits Colombes. The marriage was quite regular—though no doubt the curé’s fee was larger than usual—for the banns had been published as required. ‘Thus,’ concludes the eloquent correspondent, ‘does the grand passion once more prevail over the hypocrisies of the cloister.’ Evidently the correspondent is a rabid anti-clerical.”

“But still,” I objected, “I don’t see that that explains anything.”

“Let me help you. It was this clipping I happened to look at first the night we found the body. I read two or three lines aloud, then Simmonds put it back in the pocket. It must have been those few lines which told Miss Croydon the nature of the clippings and their importance to her. The date line would have been enough to do that. Besides, if she’d already known of them, she’d have taken them before we got here.”

“You mean Miss Croydon is the girl who ran away