Burgo's Romance

by T. W. Speight

The man glanced from the coin to Burgo's face, and then back again with a cunning leer. Then drawing a step or two nearer, he said in something between a whisper and a croak: "I don't mind telling you, sir, that I did make it my business--and why not, hey?--to see where her leddyship's big trunk was directed for.",

"Yes," said Burgo.

"Brussels was the word I read, sir, in letters a inch long."

Burgo tossed him the coin. The information was well worth it.

Half an hour later a hansom deposited him and his portmanteau at the door of his lodgings.

When he had had a bath and some breakfast he felt more like himself again. Then he lighted a pipe and sat down to consider.

His distrust of Lady Clinton, which not all her smiles and all her amiability had sufficed to eradicate, had proved to be but too well grounded. When she had found him, as the result of an accident, reinstated in Sir Everard's good graces she accepted the situation like the clever woman she was, but it had only made her all the more determined to carry out her own schemes, and she had done so with a boldness and a decision which gave Burgo a far higher opinion of her powers than he had held before. She had brushed him from her path after a fashion which not one woman in a thousand would have had either the brain to plan or the courage to carry out. Once more she had Sir Everard under her sole control, and there was no one to say her nay. What had heretofore lurked in the background of Burgo's mind as nothing more than a sinister shadow now took shape and consistency--grew and spread till it overshadowed him like a huge funereal pall, on which an invisible finger traced in letters of molten flame the one word Murder. Burgo faced the word while he shuddered at it. By what purpose save one had she been actuated from the beginning?--and recent events clearly proved that she was still as firmly bent on carrying it out as ever she had been. What that end was it seemed to him there was no longer any need to ask.

One solitary gleam of comfort came to him, and one only. It was derived from his uncle's words: "I shall not die till after the 12th of October." Meanwhile he had been spirited away--whither?

"If her ladyship thinks she has finally choked me off she will find herself very considerably mistaken," said Burgo to himself with a grim smile, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "Ten o'clock to-morrow morning will find me in Brussels."

There were two people whom he told himself he should like to see before leaving town--to wit, Mr. Garden and old Benny Hines. So, leaving the packing of his portmanteau till later in the day, he now sallied forth with the intention of calling on the latter of the two first. He had not forgotten that the old man's niece was parlour-maid at No. 22, and it seemed to him, seeing how unlikely it was that Lady Clinton should have taken any of the servants with her, unless it were her own maid and her husband's valet, that he might be able to obtain indirectly, through Benny, some information with regard to the proceedings of the day before, which would prove serviceable to him.