Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 6).djvu/251

 feeling in my pockets excitedly, "I have been robbed—I only wonder I have not been murdered."

As I spoke I felt for my watch and chain—they had vanished. My valuable diamond ring, the motive, probably, of the whole horrible conspiracy, had been removed from my finger. My studs were gone, and what money I possessed—amounting, I am glad to say, to not more than £2 or £3—was no longer in my possession. The only wonder was why my life had been spared.

"Drive to the nearest police-station. I must give information without a moment's delay," I said to the cabman.

But that is the end of the adventure. Strange, incomprehensible as it may seem, from that day to this I have never solved the enigma of that dark house in that solitary square.

West, very far west, it lies, truly; so far that the police, whom I instantly put on the alert, could never from that day to now obtain the slightest clue to its whereabouts.

For aught that I can tell, Leonora Whitby and her father may be still pursuing their deadly work.

When I read in the papers of sudden and mysterious disappearances I invariably think of them, and wonder if the experiences of the victim who has vanished from all his familiar haunts have been anything like mine—if he has waited, as I waited, in that terrible lethal chamber, with its false books, and its padded doors—if he has tasted the tortures of asphyxia and stared death in the face, but unlike me has never returned from the Vale of the Shadow.