Mysterious, Heathcote felt this man to have been, despite Trottier's idea that he was only a rich American who lived a Bohemian life as a matter of choice. It seemed to Heathcote as if there must have been some stronger ground than mere whim for an existence so secluded, so exceptional, spent in such a city as Paris, where the delight of the rich and the idle is to spend their days and nights before the eyes of an admiring crowd, and to have every movement and every caprice chronicled in the newspapers. And this man had been in the prime of his manhood, good-looking, clever, brilliant, the lover of a beautiful actress. Hardly the kind of person to hide his light under a bushel, unless there was some strong motive for concealment. What could that motive be? Heathcote wondered, as he brooded over the imperfect story of Marie Prévol and her niece. Was this Georges a swindler, who had come by his wealth in a criminal manner, and dared not show himself in the light of day? Was he one of the many tricksters and schemers of Paris, the birds of prey who live upon carrion, and who know themselves the scorn of their fellow-men? or had he a wife from whose jealous eye he was obliged to hide his devotion to Marie Prévol? Heathcote believed that there must have been some guilty reason for the life which shrank from the light of day. He had been in Paris a fortnight, and he began to ask himself how long this investigation to which he had pledged himself was likely to last. At the beginning his progress had seemed rapid--triumphant almost. Starting from utter ignorance of the name and position of the dead girl, he had arrived in a few days at an exact knowledge of her name, surroundings, and past history. Yet he was constrained to confess to himself that, armed with all these facts, he was not one whit nearer to finding the man who had murdered her. Given this history of Léonie Lemarque's childhood and youth, it was still possible that Bothwell Grahame had thrown her out of the railway-carriage. The man who took her in a hansom from Charing Cross to Paddington might have left her at the latter station. She might have gone alone upon her way towards Penzance, to encounter a villain on the road, and that villain might have been Bothwell Grahame. The thing was within the limits of possibility; though in Heathcote's present mood it seemed to him altogether unlikely. Yet firmly to establish the fact of Bothwell's innocence, he must find the man who was guilty.