“Stampa was the genius who really unraveled the mystery,” he said. “Certainly, I managed to discover, in the first instance, that you had deposited your baggage in your own name. Had all else failed, I should have converted myself into a label and stuck to your boxes till you claimed them at Basle; but once we ascertained that you had not quitted St. Moritz by train, Stampa did the rest. He knows St. Moritz like a book, and it occurred to him that you had changed your name——”
“Why, I wonder?” she broke in.
“That is rather hard to say.” He wrestled valiantly with the leg of a tough chicken, and thus was able to evade the question.
Poor Stampa! clinging tenaciously to the belief that Helen bore some resemblance to his lost daughter, remembered that when Etta made her sorrowful journey from Zermatt she gave another name at the little hostelry in Maloja where she ended her life.
“Anyhow,” went on Spencer, having dexterously severed the joint, “he tracked you from St. Moritz to the Roseg. He even hit on the shop in which you bought your rucksack and alpenstock. Then he put me on to the telephone, and the remainder of the chase was up to me.”
“I am sorry now that the dear old man did not come with you,” cried Helen. “I look on him as the first of my friends in Switzerland, and shall be more than pleased to see him again.”
“I pressed him to come along; but he refused. I don’t wish to pain you, dearest, but I guess he wants to keep track of Bower.”
Helen, who had no inkling of the tragedy that linked those two, blushed to her ears at the recollection of her parting from the millionaire.
“Do you—do you know that Mr. Bower proposed to me?” she stammered.