Again I looked upon the portrait of my dear dead love, my eyes fascinated, for I beheld there, at her throat, the small brooch I had given her on her birthday, a green enamelled heart with two hearts in diamonds entwined upon it. Those sweet, wide-open eyes, clear blue and wondering like a child's, gazed out upon me; her well-formed lips were slightly parted, as though she were speaking again, uttering those soft words that had so charmed me when she was mine, and mine only. I recollected the dress, too, one she had worn one night at dinner at the big country-house where we had been fellow-guests. Every feature of that lovely face was indelibly photographed upon my memory. Through those dark years, after that paroxysm of grief that had overtaken me when I discovered her false, I had, sleeping and waking, seen that smiling countenance as before my vision. Even in death Ella was still mine. That smile! Ah! did it not mock me? Had not Avarice and Death cheated me out of Happiness? A great darkness was over my mind, like the plague of an unending night. I set my teeth, swallowed the lump that arose in my throat, and with a sigh replaced the photograph upon the table. "A pretty face," remarked the man whose police record was in my possession. "Yes, very," I remarked casually. Ah! what a storm of bitter recollections surged through my burning brain. Had she but lived and loved how different would my own wasted, aimless life have been! Yes. She was, after all, my dear dead love--my Ella! CHAPTER TEN. MY OWN CONFESSION. The "Lion" Inn was a pleasant, old-fashioned little hostelry overlooking the bay, with Bournemouth beyond the distant haze. My room was small and clean, with white dimity curtains and hangings, and framed religious texts upon the walls. As I sat at the window in the hour before my dinner was ready, I reflected upon the strange incidents of those past few days--a chain of curious circumstances that seemed to enmesh and to entangle me. Lucie Miller--the girl whose peril was such a mysterious and yet deadly one--had actually known my Ella. That very fact seemed somehow as a further link between us. What, I wondered, did she know of those later days of my dead love's life? To me they were shrouded in mystery. That cold winter's night in damp, dismal London, when I had met her in secret at the corner of Queen's Gardens, would ever remain in my memory. She was staying with an aunt in Porchester Terrace, and we had always preserved the secret of our affection. She came dressed in black, wearing a thick veil and carrying a muff in which was a bunch of violets. Her voice, when I greeted her, was, alas! not the same. Quick to recognise that something had occurred, I inquired the reason. Had she had any difference with her father or her aunt--as she sometimes had? No, she said, shaking her head, it was not that.