The receipt of that telegram was suspicious. What new conspiracy was in progress, I wondered? Evidently something had occurred. Either he had been warned that the police were in search of him, and had escaped back to the Continent, or else certain of his plans had been matured earlier than he anticipated. As I sat there in the old-fashioned room, with its punch-bowls full of sweet-smelling roses, I resolved to travel south to the Mediterranean, see Lucie, and endeavour to find some way in which to rescue my love from her father's accomplice. From that Dorsetshire village to the old sun-blanched port of Leghorn is a far cry--thirty-six hours in the express from Calais on the road to Rome--yet that night I was back in Granville Gardens; and hastily packing up my traps, chatting with Sammy the while, I next morning left London for Italy. I told my friend but little. The circumstances were too complicated and puzzling, and the tragedy of it all was so complete that I preferred to remain silent. I was going south, upon one of those erratic journeys I so very often took. I might return in a fortnight, or in six months. All depended upon the mood in which I found myself. Therefore he accepted my explanation, knowing well as a constant traveller and thoroughgoing cosmopolitan himself, and he saw me off from Charing Cross, wishing me _bon voyage_. The journey by way of Calais, Paris, Modane and Turin you yourself have done often, so why need I describe it? You have lunched between Calais and Paris, dined at the Gare de Lyon, turned into your narrow sleeping berth between Paris and the frontier, lunched in the _wagon-restaurant_ between Modane and Busseleno, scrambled through your dinner in the big buffet at Genoa, and cursed those stifling tunnels between Genoa and Spezia, where between them you get your first glimpses of the moonlit Mediterranean, and you have alighted at old marble-built Pisa, the quaint dead city that contains one of the wonders of the world--the Leaning Tower. From Pisa you have gone on to Rome, or to Florence, but I question if you have ever travelled over that ten-mile branch line down to the ancient seaport of the Medici, Leghorn. The English, save the mercantile marine and a stray traveller or two, never go to Livorno, as it is called in Italian, and yet it is in summer the Brighton of Italy, and one of the gayest places in Europe during the bathing season. It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when I alighted at the "Palace," that great white hotel on the sea-front, and went to the room allotted to me--one with an inviting balcony overlooking the promenade and the fashionable bathing establishment of Pancaldi. Livorno was full, the night-porter informed me. It was the height of the season, and there was not another vacant bed in any hotel in the town that night.