Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/252

236 intimate friends that I should never marry. I preferred the liberty of bachelorhood to the high respectability and heavy responsibilities of married life. And yet how strange life is? Was I not an actor in one of the strangest romances of our modern days, seated at the side of the woman I had rescued from her living tomb? Surely there is still romance in our hum-drum life of the twentieth century just as strange and curious as that of the far-back mediæval days, those days when that grim old fortress had been constructed by its feudal lord.

I took her tiny soft hand in mine again and held it for a long while. She sighed, and then I thought I felt a shudder run through her. I pressed her hand again, and her slim fingers closed over mine tightly, while she gazed around into the grey mist, her vision rendered the keener by the loss of speech and hearing.

Still holding her hands in both my own I gripped them to show her that I intended to be her champion, while she turned to me in confidence as though happy that it should be so.

What, I wondered, was her history? What was the mystery surrounding her? What could be that secret which had caused her enemies to thus brutally maim and mutilate her, and afterwards send her to that grim, terrible fortress that still loomed up before us in the gloom?

Surely her secret must affect some person very seriously, or such drastic means would never be employed to secure her silence.

In silence I sat, still holding the hand which she