The White Lie

Author of “The Temptress,” “In White Raiment,” “The Room of Secrets,” etc.

“A woman—perhaps?”
“Who knows! Poor Dick Harborne was certainly a man of secrets, and of many adventures.”
“Well, it certainly is a most mysterious affair. You, my dear Barclay, appear to be the last person to have spoken to him.”
“Apparently I was,” replied Lieutenant Noel Barclay, of the Naval Flying Corps, a tall, slim, good-looking, clean-shaven man in aviator’s garb, and wearing a thick woollen muffler and a brown leather cap with rolls at the ears, as he walked one August afternoon up the village street of Mundesley-on-Sea, in Norfolk, a quaint, old-world street swept by the fresh breeze of the North Sea. “Yesterday I flew over here from Yarmouth to see the cable-laying, and met Dick in the post-office. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. We were shipmates in the Antrim before he retired from the service and went abroad.”
“Came into money, I suppose?” remarked his companion, Francis Goring, a long-legged, middle-aged man, who, in a suit of well-worn tweeds, presented the ideal type of the English landowner, as indeed he was—owner of Keswick Hall, a fine place a few miles distant, and a Justice of the Peace for the county of Norfolk.
“No,” replied the aviator, unwinding his woollen scarf. “That’s just it. I don’t think he came into money. He simply retired, and next we heard was that he was living a wandering, adventurous life on the Continent. I ran up against him in town once or twice, and he always seemed amazingly prosperous. Yet there was some sort of a mystery about him—of that I have always felt certain.”
“That’s interesting,” declared the man at his side. “Anything suspicious—eh?”
“Well, I hardly know. Only, one night as I was walking from the Empire along to the Rag, I passed a man very seedy and down-at-heel. He recognised me in an instant, and hurried on towards Piccadilly Circus. It was Dick—of that I’m absolutely convinced. I had a cocktail with him in the club next day, but he never referred to the incident.”