[CHAPTER V.]
A FACE FROM THE GRAVE.
A week passed. Julian Wyllard attended the sale at the Hôtel Drouot, bought three of the smaller gems of the Rochejaquelin gallery, and allowed the Raffaelle to pass into a national collection. His wife and he had gone about Paris and its environs in the mean while; Dora very happy in revisiting the spots she had admired in her youth.
The week had gone, and there had been no reply to Heathcote's advertisement. But there had been a letter from Joseph Distin.
"The last few days have not been entirely barren in results," he wrote. "Léonie Lemarque's handbag has been found at the Charing Cross Station; it was left in the waiting-room on the morning of the 5th July, immediately after the arrival of the mail train from Dover. The bag is now in my office. It contains some linen, marked L. L., slippers, brush, and comb; but not a document of any kind. Nothing to afford the slightest clue to the girl's business in London. The police have found a hansom-cabman who drove a tall, gentlemanlike man and a French girl from Charing Cross to Paddington Station on the morning of the 5th of July, in time for the Penzance train. They had no luggage. The cabman believes that he should recognise the man if he saw him again, but can give no clear description of his appearance, except that he was a fine-looking man in the prime of life. He talked French to the girl, and the cabman supposes him to have been a Frenchman. He and the girl appeared to be on very good terms. The cabman saw them go into the Paddington Station together, about five minutes before the starting of the train. The photograph of the dead girl has been shown to this cabman, and he has identified it as the likeness of the little French girl he drove in his cab."
This was all the progress that Joseph Distin's agents had made at present. The facts looked dark against the man who had taken Léonie Lemarque from station to station. If he had been innocent of all wrong in relation to that helpless stranger, surely he would have replied to the advertisement; he would have come forward to say what part he had taken in the history of Léonie Lemarque.
Heathcote stopped the first advertisement, and inserted a second worded thus:
"Monsieur Georges, who resided in Paris in the year '71, and for some years previously, or any friend of Monsieur Georges now residing in England, is earnestly requested to communicate with Messrs. Distin & Son, Solicitors, Furnival's Inn."
He had not much hope of getting a reply to this advertisement, after the failure of the previous appeal, but he thought it was well to advertise this name of Georges. Some insignificant person, some busybody who had known the man Georges at some period of his existence, might reply; and any information so obtained might form a link in the chain of that strange story of Marie Prévol and her mysterious lover.
Mysterious, Heathcote felt this man to have been, despite Trottier's idea that he was only a rich American who lived a Bohemian life as a matter of choice. It seemed to Heathcote as if there must have been some stronger ground than mere whim for an existence so secluded, so exceptional, spent in such a city as Paris, where the delight of the rich and the idle is to spend their days and nights before the eyes of an admiring crowd, and to have every movement and every caprice chronicled in the newspapers.