“He left us then, and I have never seen him since. But he kept his word, though it was nearly a week before the messenger came,—a big, surly man, very lame, as the result of a recent accident, I think.”
“Mishka!” I exclaimed.
“He would not tell his name, and said very little one way or the other, but he took us to the carriage, and we reached the city without hindrance. Anne was in a dazed condition the whole time,—partly, no doubt, as a result of the drugs which those scoundrels who kidnapped her and brought her to Russia had administered. She knew me, but everything else was almost a blank to her, as it still is. She has only a faint recollection of the whole affair.
“I secured a passport for her and we started at once, though she wasn’t fit to travel, and the journey nearly killed her. We ought to have stopped as soon as we were over the frontier, but I wanted to get as far away from Russia as possible. She just held out till we got to Berlin, and then broke down altogether—my poor child!
“I ought to have written to Mrs. Cayley, I know; but I never gave a thought to it till Anne began to recover—”
“That’s all right; Mary understood, and she’s forgiven the omission long ago,” Jim interposed. “But, I say, Pendennis, I was right, after all! I always stuck out that it was a case of mistaken identity, though you wouldn’t believe me!”
Pendennis nodded.
“The woman from Siberia—what was she like?” he demanded, turning again to me.
“I can’t say. I only saw her from a distance, and for a minute or so,” I answered evasively. “She was tall and white-haired.”