Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/182

 CHAPTER XVII

RELATES A SCANDAL AT RANNOCH.

THE strange letter of Elma Heath, combined with what Lydia Moreton had told me, aroused within me a determination to investigate the mystery. From the moment I had landed from the Lola on that hot breathless night at Leghorn, mystery had crowded upon mystery until it was all bewildering.

It was now proved that the sweet-faced girl, the original of the torn photograph, held a secret, and that, by her own words, she knew that death was approaching. The incomprehensible attempt upon my life, the strange actions of Hornby and Chater — who, by the way, seemed to have entirely disappeared — the assassination of the man who by masquerading as the Italian waiter had met his death, and the murder of Olinto's wife were all problems which required solution.

Had it not been for the mystery of it all — and mystery ever arouses the human curiosity — I should have given up trying to get at the truth. Yet as a man with some leisure, and knowing by that letter of Elma Heath's that she was in sore distress, I redoubled my efforts to ascertain the reason of it all.