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Page 21
I unfolded the letter carefully. It was neatly written in a hand
like copper plate and dated Buenos Aires.
DEAR COLONEL WALKER: When I discovered that you were planting an
agent on every ship I had to abandon the plates and try for the
reward. Thank you for the five thousand; it covered expenses.
Very sincerely yours,
D. Mulehaus.
III. The Lost Lady
It was a remark of old Major Carrington that incited this
adventure.
"It is some distance through the wood - is she quite safe?"
It was a mere reflection as he went out. It was very late. I do
not know how the dinner, or rather the after-hours of it, had
lengthened. It must have been the incomparable charm of the
woman. She had come, this night, luminously, it seemed to us,
through the haze that had been on her - the smoke haze of a
strange, blighting fortune. The three of us had been carried
along in it with no sense of time; my sister, the ancient Major
Carrington and I.
He turned back in the road, his decayed voice whipped by the
stimulus of her into a higher note.
"Suppose the village coachman should think her as lovely as we do
- what!"
He laughed and turned heavily up the road a hundred yards or so
to his cottage set in the pine wood. I stood in the road
watching the wheels of the absurd village vehicle, the yellow
cut-under, disappear. The old Major called back to me; his voice
seemed detached, eerie with the thin laugh in it.
"I thought him a particularly villainous-looking creature!"
It was an absurd remark. The man was one of the natives of the
island, and besides, the innkeeper was a person of sound sense;
he would know precisely about his driver.
I should not have gone on this adventure but for a further
incident.
When I entered the house my sister was going up the stair, the
butler was beyond in the drawing-room, and there was no other
servant visible. She was on the first step and the elevation
gave precisely the height that my sister ought to have received
in the accident of birth. She would have been wonderful with
those four inches added - lacking beauty, she had every other
grace!
She spoke to me as I approached.
"Winthrop," she said, "what was in the package that Madame Barras
carried away with her tonight?"
The query very greatly surprised me. I thought Madame Barras had
carried this package away with her several evenings before when I
had put her English bank-notes in my box at the local bank. My
sister added the explanation which I should have been embarrassed
to seek, at the moment.
"She asked me to put it somewhere, on Tuesday afternoon . . . .
It was forgotten, I suppose . . . . I laid it in a drawer of the
library table . . . . What did it contain?"
I managed an evasive reply, for the discovery opened
possibilities that disturbed me.
"Some certificates, I believe," I said.
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