“Excuse me!—I am a stranger in London, and a friend has made me an honorary member of this club for a short time—I knew a Miss Diana May in Geneva—permit me——” And he proffered his visiting-card, on which was inscribed:
“Marchese Luigi Farnese.”
“I met Miss May,” he continued, “at the house of a very distinguished Russian scientist, Dr. Féodor Dimitrius. She had come from England on a visit to his mother, so I was informed. But I had an idea at the time that she had arrived in answer to an advertisement he had put in the Paris newspapers for a lady assistant,—of course I may have been wrong. She was a very bright, rather clever middle-aged person——”
“The Miss May I spoke of just now,” interpolated Cleeve, “is quite a young girl—not more than eighteen or nineteen.”
“Oh, then!”—and Farnese made a profoundly apologetic bow—“it cannot be the same. The lady I met was—ah!—thirty-five or so—perhaps forty. She left Geneva very suddenly, and I have been trying to trace her ever since.”
“May I ask why?” inquired Cleeve.
“Certainly! I have for long been interested in the scientific investigations of Dr. Dimitrius—he is a very mysterious person, and I fancied he might be trying some experiment on this lady, Miss May. She gave me no idea of such a thing—she was quite a normal, cheerful person,—still I had my suspicions and I was curious about it. She went with him and his mother to winter at Davos Platz—I was unable to follow them there, as I had a pressure of business—but I heard from a friend that Miss May was the ‘belle’ of the season. This rather surprised me, as she was not young enough to be a ‘belle’ unless”—here he paused, and uttered the next words with singular emphasis—“Dimitrius had made her so.”
Cleeve uttered a sharp exclamation and then checked himself.
“This is not an age of fairy tales,” he said curtly.
“No—it is not, but it is an age of science, in which fairy tales are realised,” rejoined Farnese. “But pray excuse me!—I am detaining you—you could not by chance give me the address of this young lady you speak of?—the Miss Diana May you know?”