Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/235

 CHAPTER XXII

ELMA HEATH

I LOOKED straight into those sad, wide-open, yet unflinching brown eyes utterly confounded.

Those white wrists held in steel, that pale face and blanched lips, the inertness of her movements, all told their own tragic tale. And yet that letter I had read, dictated in secret most probably because her hands were not free, was certainly not the outpourings of a madwoman. She had spoken of death, it was true, yet was it not to be supposed that she was slowly being driven to suicide?

She had kept her secret, and she wished the man Hornby — the man who was to marry Muriel Leithcourt — to know.

The room in which we stood was evidently an apartment set apart for her use, for beyond was the tiny bedchamber; yet the small high-up window was closely barred, and the cold bareness of the prison was sufficient indeed to cause any one confined there to prefer death to captivity.

Again I spoke to her slowly and kindly, but there was no response. That she was absolutely dumb was only too apparent. Yet surely she had not always been so! I had gone in search of her because