“I warn you not to attempt any treachery toward me, madam. My friends are here, remember,” Italy said warningly. “I swear I mean you no harm. I am frightened for your safety, that is all. But I must go and see about that new arrival,” and she darted out, leaving the girl alone. Italy sprang to follow, but Mrs. Smith was too quick. The door slammed, the key clicked in the lock on the other side. She was a prisoner. For a moment her heart stood still with terror. Then reason came to her aid. “She will have to release me presently. My friends will not leave the house without me.” She flew back to the open drawer of the secrétaire, snatched up the diary, and sank tremblingly into the cushioned chair. Alas! the golden clasp of the book was locked, and the key missing. She remembered with a thrill of horror that she had seen among the trinkets on Percy Seabright’s watch-chain a tiny golden key. He had laughingly told Alys Audenreid, when she asked about it, that it was the key to a mystery. “It is the key to Aunt Ione’s locked bracelet, I think,” returned Alys, and though he had denied it no one believed it. But now Italy guessed at the fatal truth. It was the key to the diary, and he had carried it away with him across the ocean. Desperate with impatience, she tugged at the lock, pulling with all the strength of her little hands. The rivets on one side of the clasp yielded, the side of it flew loose, the book opened its closely written pages to her eager eyes. On the flyleaf she read, in her father’s writing, his name, Ronald Vale. And then a low groan of horror came from her livid lips. She had identified the missing diary not only by her father’s name, but by gruesome spots here and there on the pages--spots that looked like red rust, but that she guessed too truly were her father’s blood. “The diary was lying by your father’s elbow when I parted from him. It must have been there when he was murdered,” her mother had said to her more than once. She shuddered all over and looked at her white fingers as though she expected to see stains of blood on their fairness, then she opened the book and began to read at random the paragraphs that caught her eyes. Among the first entries, mention was made of Ronald Vale’s first meeting with, and growing friendship for, the man who had proved his fate. “We are congenial souls--brothers,” wrote Ronald Vale. “I did not believe it was possible to love a man as fondly as I love Percy Seabright. He is a most charming companion, bright, witty, intellectual. He has been everywhere, although still so very young; he has read everything; he is a poet in feeling, and a gifted amateur actor. But I own he has one fault: He is continually boasting of his conquests over women, and to listen to Percy, one might believe that every woman of his acquaintance, married and single, is in love with him.