Page:The Death-Doctor.djvu/27

Rh I caught a gleam of fear, even of terror, in her dark eyes as she glanced towards the door.

"Very well, not another word," I laughed. "But why do you talk of 'the dear old days'?"

"Ah! I was very happy in the convent school, everybody was very kind to me, and I was never left alone with nothing to do. Now father often has to leave me for whole days, and I am not even allowed out without him," was her answer, made with a most adorable pout. Certainly she was charmingly pretty, and apparently innocence and freshness itself.

And yet, what did she know? Why the warning? I racked my brains to try and discover the mystery.

In four days' time we were comfortably settled in an hotel at Sorrento. You know that little Italian town, I believe. You went there one winter. It is hard to find a more charming spot in the whole of that land of colour and picturesque beauty.

The hotel, built upon the edge of the high cliff which forms the "seaward" wall of the town, was full, at that season, of tourists and visitors—English, American, German and French—as also were all the other hotels in the place.