"I then, following the plan laid down for me by Henri Lutin, asked
Messrs. Zosean at what hotel Fernando Apra had stayed. I was given two
addresses. These addresses I handed on to my friend the secret enquiry
agent, and the rest of the story belongs to him, for it was Lutin who
discovered all that I am now going to tell you."
Greville Howard stopped speaking. He looked thoughtfully at the woman
who sat ensconced in the low arm-chair opposite him.
He felt rather as a man may be supposed to feel who is about to put a
light to a fuse which will in due course blow up a powder magazine.
There even came over his subtle, tortuous mind a thrill of pity for the
man whom he was about to sacrifice to this pretty woman's desire for
vengeance and--as he could not help seeing--jealous hatred of another
woman who might, for all he knew, be in every way more worthy of his
interest, even of his admiration, than she who sat there looking at him
with gleaming eyes and parted lips.
But Greville Howard, like all his kind, was a fatalist as well as
something of a philosopher. He could not have lived the life he had led,
and done the work which had built up his great fortune, had he been
anything else, and Katty had come at a very fortunate psychological
moment for him--as well as for herself. Greville Howard was becoming
what he had rarely ever been--bored; he was longing consciously for a
fresh interest and for a new companionship in his life. And so:
"Perhaps you will be disappointed at the meagreness of what I am about
to tell you, but you may believe me when I say that it is information
which will make the way of Sir Angus Kinross quite clear, and which may
bring one, if not two, men to the gallows."
Katty gave a little involuntary gasp. But he went on:
"It did not take my friend Lutin very long to discover that a man of the
name of Apra had stayed at each of the hotels indicated to me by the
bankers. He also discovered that 'Apra' had with him a friend named
Dickinson who put down his birthplace as New York. Do you follow me,
Mrs. Winslow?"
"Yes, I think so," she replied hesitatingly.
"At the first hotel, a small, comfortable, rather expensive house in
the Madeleine quarter, Fernando Apra was a tall, dark, good-looking man,
and the other, the New Yorker, was fair and short. Though on the best of
terms they lived very different lives. The American was out a great
deal; he thoroughly enjoyed the gay, lively sides of Paris life.
Fernando Apra on the other hand stayed indoors, reading and writing a
good deal. At last the two men left the hotel, giving out that they were
going to spend the winter in the South of France. But they only stayed a
few days at Lyons and, doubling back to Paris, they settled in the Latin
Quarter on the other side of the river.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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