He wrote back a most earnest letter to Frank Amberley. But little did he imagine how vast was the debt of gratitude due to that noble soul. The moment the verdict was pronounced as to the cause of Leonardo Gilardoni’s death, he would hurry to London, he told the young lawyer. At present it would be impossible for him to be absent. He did not repeat the suspicions he had touched on in the telegram forwarded by him in the morning, for that would be but to repeat an accusation he could not in any way sustain. The next morning he set about making cautious inquiries, in order to find out, if possible, whether any human being had seen the figure that had passed him like an apparition on the way to the station. But vainly. No one had seen this woman. The porter at the railway-station whom Captain Desfrayne had missed, remembered a woman coming hastily in to catch the last train; but she, he declared, had worn a pale-green dress, a black lace shawl, and had a snow-white Shetland fall over her bonnet, concealing her face effectually as well. In effect, Lucia Guiscardini had made a rapid change in her toilet almost as she entered the station, by looping up her black skirt, changing her black cloak for a lace shawl folded up in the small black leather bag she carried, and changing her black fall for a white one. The black cloak, bought expressly for this expedition, she had hurriedly folded up, and, darting for a moment into the ladies’ room, dropped it on the couch, making it look as if some one had forgotten it. The old woman at whose cottage Madam Guiscardini had appointed to meet Leonardo Gilardoni was away, gone to see a granddaughter, who lay dying some ten miles off. Thus Paul Desfrayne did not find her, nor did he know of her existence. The boy had departed with her. No one could throw the slightest ray of light on the history of those hours of apparent solitude which had been spent by the unhappy valet from the departure until the return of his master on that last day of his life. No one had seen him leave the barracks during any part of the day--none had seen him return. It had happened that the boy charged with Madam Guiscardini’s message had not needed to ask for him, because Gilardoni was walking about the yard, and to him the lad had first spoken. The analyzing doctors found nothing to justify any suspicion of the existence of poison. Such signs as were apparent resembled those of apoplexy so closely that the most accurate judges might easily have been deceived. They gave in a certificate to the effect that the cause of death was apoplexy. It would have been worse than useless to accuse Lucia Guiscardini. Paul Desfrayne began to persuade himself that he must have been deluded by his own excited imagination when he fancied he saw her on that lonely, darksome road. At the end of a few days he was able to run up to London. His first visit was to Frank Amberley.