“No, there is nothing. Yet, stay a moment, there is that paper on the table; take that, it may be of use; it may help to explain. But come, do come! I shall faint if I stop in this place a minute longer!”
Alec picked up and placed in his pocket a written paper that lay on the table, and, careless of further concern about the house, quickly left it with Bertha on his arm, and it was not till they were seated side by side in the cab that Miss Summerhayes seemed to draw her breath freely.
As the cab bowled along, they were too busy with mutual congratulations to remark, on another road parallel to their own, a second cab hastening in the direction from which they had just come. Without recognition these two cabs passed each other not four hundred feet away, the riders in each having their eyes closed to that which would have interested them so much.
It was in disjointed fragments that Bertha related her experience, and, pieced together, Alec found it came to this—
She was enticed into the cab by a bushy-whiskered man, who said he had been sent to take her to Mr. Norris, who was seriously ill. The cab, she remembered, came up Oxford Street, when she pointed out that they were going in the wrong direction. The man then told her that Mr. Norris was at a friend’s house at Darlinghurst, but very soon the cab passed that place, and then she called out and wanted to stop the cab or summon assistance. After that she could remember nothing till she came to her senses, feeling very sick and faint, in the room where Alec had found her.
Looking about in the half-darkened room she found a written paper on the table, the same that Alec had in his pocket. Alec took it out and read as follows—
“Miss Summerhayes is warned for her own safety to make no effort to escape or noise of any kind, as it will only force those who watch her to do again what was done in the cab. On these conditions no harm shall happen to you.—A Friend.”
“Reading that made you keep quiet, I suppose,” said Alec.
“Yes,” said Bertha. “I did not want to be smothered again, and I was terrified almost to death, sitting there alone all day, not knowing what was to happen next. Perhaps they were going to murder me, or throw me over the cliffs, for I could hear the noise of the surf. But noise in the house I heard none, till you came and broke open the door. How did you find me out?”
Then Alec gave his account, how he had gone to Soft Sam, and acting on his advice, had advertised for the cabman, how a man had replied, and in spite of his assertion to the contrary, most likely the cabman himself. The rest Bertha knew.