“You see,” Benedict went on, noting the animated expression on her face, “I am a newspaper reporter, Miss Strong, and in my work I come into contact with many curious phases of life and queer kinds of people in New York. Of course you have never met a Rexanian, excepting your lodge-keeper, Rudolph?”
“Oh, but I have,” cried Kate, who did not fully realize that her accident had rendered her slightly feverish and therefore somewhat more loquacious than usual. “A Rexanian dined at our house in the city a few nights ago. He had come over on the steamer with my father and mother. He was a very charming man.”
There was something in her voice that impressed Benedict as peculiar.
“One of the Rexanian nobility, of course?” he asked, diplomatically.
“Yes,” she answered, with some hesitation. “He was a count—Count Szalaki.” Her face flushed as the thought flashed through her mind that her frankness in the presence of a newspaper reporter was, to say the least of it, indiscreet. But there were many influences at work to render Kate Strong less reticent than she ordinarily was by habit and temperament. The sudden disappearance of their Rexanian guest and the shadow that had been cast upon his memory by her family had made her impatient to clear up the mystery that surrounded the only man who had ever fully satisfied the romantic longings that pertained to her youth and her self-centred nature.
That Ned Strong was fitted neither by temperament nor by experience to solve a problem that grew more and more inexplicable as time passed, his sister well knew. Already he had lost interest in a mystery that grew more important to Kate the longer it remained unsolved. She herself was powerless to prosecute a line of inquiry that, she felt sure, would, if carried forward to the end, exonerate the Rexanian whose melancholy and fascinating face had impressed her as that of a man whose soul was too lofty for subterfuge and fraud.
Fate had thrown her into the enforced companionship of a man whose journalistic training had thoroughly fitted him for solving mysteries of the kind that now weighed upon her overwrought mind. Conflicting emotions warred within her. She possessed many of the prejudices and all the self-control that pertain to the real patrician; added to these was a maidenly fear that somebody might discover the secret that agitated her heart—a secret that she hardly dared to whisper to herself. On the other hand, she had grown almost desperate in her anxiety to learn something more of Count Szalaki, to receive an explanation of his seemingly churlish silence that would vindicate her innermost conviction that he was what her fancy painted him. Perhaps under other circumstances her natural disinclination to grow too confidential with a man about whom she knew almost nothing would have prevailed, but the reaction following her accident had rendered her will-power less active than usual and her inclination to give way to an impulse stronger.
“Count Szalaki!” exclaimed Norman Benedict, musingly. Suddenly an expression of eagerness crossed his face. “His name was on the passenger list of one of the incoming steamers recently. I noticed it at the time. And so he is a Rexanian! That is very interesting. You were kind enough to say a moment ago, Miss Strong, that you owe me a debt of gratitude. That is hardly true, for what I have done for you has been a pleasure to me. But, frankly, you can do me a kindness. I should very much like to meet Count Szalaki.”
A mournful expression rested on Kate Strong’s face.
“I am sorry,” she said regretfully, “but I cannot gratify your wish. We—we—don’t know where Count Szalaki is.”