“I know!” she exclaimed in a broken voice, quite unnatural to her, her eyes fixed upon me, “I know, Mr Greenwood, why you have called. The truth has been told to me by Mr Leighton an hour ago. Ah! my poor dear father!” she sighed, the words catching in her throat as she burst into tears. “Why did he go to Manchester? His enemies have triumphed, just as I have all along feared they would. Yet, great-hearted as he was, he believed ill of no man. He refused always to heed my warnings, and laughed at all my apprehensions. Yet, alas! the ghastly truth is now only too plain. My poor father!” she gasped, her handsome face blanched to the lips. “He is dead—and his secret is out!”
Chapter Four.
Which Traverses Dangerous Ground.
“Are you really suspicious, Mabel, that your father has been the victim of foul play?” I inquired quickly of the dead man’s daughter, standing pale and unnerved before me.
“I am,” was her direct, unhesitating answer. “You know his story, Mr Greenwood; you know how he carried with him everywhere something he had sewed in a piece of chamois leather; something which was his most precious possession. Mr Leighton tells me that it is missing.”
“That is unfortunately so,” I said. “We all three searched for it among his clothes and in his luggage; we made inquiry of the luncheon-car attendant who found him insensible in the railway carriage, of the porters who conveyed him to the hotel, of every one, in fact, but can find no trace of it whatsoever.”
“Because it has been deliberately stolen,” she remarked.
“Then your theory is that he has been assassinated in order to conceal the theft?”