"What is the name of that place in the country where your uncle used to live?" she asked.
"Beechley Towers."
"And the name of that cousin to whom your uncle left his property?"
"Gerald Brooke--confound him!--But why do you ask?"
For sole reply she handed him the newspaper, marking a certain passage with her finger as she did so. If Mrs. Crofton was startled by something which caught her eye in the paper, her feelings were as nothing in comparison with those of her husband as his keen glance took in the purport of the paragraph in question. It was, in fact, little more than a paragraph in the form of a brief telegram, forwarded at a late hour by a country correspondent.
What the public were told in the telegram was that the Baron von Rosenberg had been found in his own grounds, shot through the heart, about seven o'clock in the evening; that strong circumstantial evidence pointed to the supposition that Mr. Gerald Brooke, a near neighbour of the Baron, was the murderer; that he had disappeared immediately after the perpetration of the crime, and that, although he was still at large, the police had little doubt they would succeed in arresting him in the course of the next few hours.
For a little while, speech seemed powerless to express a tithe of what George Crofton felt when the words of the telegram had burned themselves into his brain. What a sea of conflicting emotions surged round his heart as his mind drank in the full purport of the message and all the possibilities therein implied! What a vista of the future it opened out!
"A little rouge, mon cher, would improve your complexion," said his wife at length, who had been watching him curiously out of her half-veiled eyes. "If one were to judge by your looks, you might have committed the crime yourself."
Her words served to rouse him. "Stephanie, the day of my revenge is dawning at last!" He ground out the words between his set teeth. "This Gerald Brooke--this well-beloved cousin of mine--is the man who came between my uncle and me and defrauded me out of my inheritance."
"And the man who robbed you of the woman you loved, whom you hoped one day to make your wife."