“Heavens! we are lost,” cried Scrivener. “Go, madam; they cannot touch your dead; but if you do as he wishes, you will leave us now.”
“Yes, I will go,” said Nance. “But one moment first.”
She fell on her knees by the body of her husband, and bending down printed a long kiss on the cold lips. In doing so she noticed that the lips themselves were smooth and undisfigured. There was no mark.
Scrivener was true to his word, and early the following morning Murray Cameron was restored to his friends. Crossley, aided by Jacob Short, had given the alarm to the police, and the Silver School was broken up for ever.
Nance returned for one night to Rowton Heights—it was just before she and Murray started to begin a new life in Australia—her object was to secure a certain box.
“I do not know what it contains,” she reflected, “but if it means revenge, I would rather break my vow to the dead than use it now!”
She packed it carefully, and, half way between England and the New World, dropped it into deep water. Thus its secret was never revealed.
But afterwards a dying man in Paris made a strange confession. He declared to the priest who absolved him that for years he had belonged to a notorious gang of burglars in London, who went by the name of the Silver School. He himself was known by the sobriquet of Spider. Amongst the queer friendships of his life was one with the gentleman leader of that gang, a man called Silver. The likeness between the two was remarkable, and there was an occasion when, for purposes of his own, it came into Spider’s head to personate Silver. He did so in order to take the life of a young Englishman with whom he had quarrelled in a Parisian café. The Englishman had discovered one of his most important secrets, and Spider, with the ruthlessness of his class, resolved to silence him in the only effectual way. In order to divert suspicion entirely from himself, he used a cipher and hieroglyphic, the secret of which Rowton had once confided to him.
“On my lips,” said the dying man, “you will find the mark of a death’s head and arrows which was tattooed there years ago. You may use this confession after my death.”
THE END.