“I cannot think,” Olive went on, “that Mr. Manning will ever be found. I think he has been killed.”
“Why?” asked Wise, briefly.
“You know, he was a Secret Service man. Many times he has had the narrowest escape with his life, and—I’m not sure of this,—but I think now, he was on the track of the nest of spies with which my—with which Mr. Gately was mixed up. A few slight incidents, otherwise unexplainable, make this clear to me now, though I never suspected it before. My uncle disliked Mr. Manning, and it may have been because he knew he was in the Government’s employ. And though I know Mr. Gately would never have moved a finger to put Amory Manning out of the way, yet George Rodman may have done so. Oh, it’s all so mysterious, so complicated,—but of this I’m sure, Case Rivers is in no way connected with the whole matter. He is a man from some distant city, he is unacquainted in New York, and he——” here Olive broke down utterly and fell into a hysterical burst of weeping.
Zizi rose and gently urged Olive to go with her from the room.
A silence fell as the two girls disappeared. It was broken by Mrs. Vail, who remarked, dolefully, “I do hope that nice Mr. Rivers will come back, for dear Olive is so in love with him.”
“What!” cried Pennington Wise, “Miss Raynor in love with Rivers! That will never do! Why, we’ve no idea who he is. He may be a fortune-hunter of the lowest type!”
“Oh, no, no!” denied Mrs. Vail, “he is a most courteous gentleman.”
“That doesn’t count,” stormed Wise; “although, perhaps, I spoke too strongly just now when I called him names!”
“Especially as he has no name!” I put in; “in fact, he calls himself a self-named man!”
Wise smiled: “He is a witty chap,” he conceded, “and I like him immensely. But it’s up to us, Brice, to safeguard Miss Raynor’s interests, and a possible suitor for the hand of an heiress ought, at least, to know his own ancestors! And then, again, unless he recovers his memory and can deny it, there’s a fair chance that he had some hand in the Gately murder. We can’t get away from that snowflake pattern drawn on the blotter. Rivers was there, in that room, he sat at Gately’s desk, opposite Gately himself,—I mean, of course, this is the way I reconstruct the matter,—and if he didn’t shoot Gately then and there, at least, we have no proof that he didn’t.”