"It is a very strange case," he said, "and I don't wonder that you are following it up earnestly. No, I never heard Georges mention any English friend. It was a bold stroke for the grandmother to send the girl to a man who was the friend of the murderer of her daughter. A drowning man will catch at a straw, says your proverb; and this poor woman, penniless and friendless on her death-bed, may have caught at the name of the only rich man upon whom she could advance the faintest claim. And what was the nature of that claim? A packet of Georges' love-letters. Compromising love-letters, perhaps, to be offered to Georges' friend as the price of protection and aid for the orphan girl. A strange story. And no one knows what became of those letters?" "No one, as yet. No letters were found upon the girl. Even the handbag she carried with her had disappeared." "A very strange story. I wish I could help you to read the riddle. Your interest in it I imagine to be something beyond the mere artistic interest in a curious case." "Yes, I am concerned in arriving at the truth, for the sake of one whom I honour and revere. I shall be deeply grateful if you can help me." "Then I will help you," answered the paragraphist quietly; and Edward Heathcote felt that in this amateur detective he had a stronger ally than in the old police-officer of the left bank. CHAPTER III. BOTHWELL BEGINS TO SEE HIS WAY. Dreary days followed for Bothwell Grahame after that final interview with Lady Valeria. He had broken his bonds, he had escaped from the Circe whose fatal spells had held him captive so long. He was his own man again, he could stand up before his fellow-men and fear no reproach--nay, he could even dare to meet that kind old man whose friendship had never been withheld from him. He could look General Harborough in the face, and clasp his hand without feeling himself a craven and a traitor, and that is a thing which he had not been able to do for the last three years. He was relieved, rejoiced at the breaking of that old tie, and yet there was a touch of pain in such a parting. There came a bitter pang of remorse now and again to disturb his sense of newly-recovered peace. Such severances can never happen without pain. The man who can be utterly indifferent to the agony of a woman he has once loved must have a heart of stone. Bothwell was not stony-hearted. He knew that Valeria Harborough was not a good woman--that she had been shamefully false to the best of husbands--that she had abandoned herself recklessly to the promptings of a fatal passion. But he had loved her once: and his heart bled for her now in her misery and abandonment. He was haunted by the vision of her face, as she had risen up before him, white as the very dead, her eyes flashing, her lips quivering, her voice subdued by passion to a serpent-like hiss, as she told him-- "You are in love with another woman!"