“Sworn before me,—
“John Hatchard (Registrar).”
The special licence had, it appeared, been granted on the following day, but the clerk said the applicant had been seen by his colleague, now absent.
Feeling that at least I should know the whereabouts of the strange company who held in their charge the lifeless form of the woman I loved, I drove rapidly to Bayswater, but when the cab turned from Westbourne Grove into Hereford Road, and I saw that the house for which I was searching, the number of which appeared in the licence, was a small tobacconist and newsvendor’s, my heart again sank within me.
I alighted and made inquiry of the shopkeeper, but she knew of no young lady named Sybil, nor of any person named Henniker. Once again, then, I was foiled; the address given in the affidavit was false.
For hours I drove aimlessly about the streets and squares lying between Praed Street and Oxford Street, vaguely looking for a house I had never distinctly seen, until at last it grew dark; then, cold and wearied, I returned to my chambers.
As day succeeded day I continued my search, but could not grasp a single certainty. At Somerset House I could discover no facts regarding either the marriage or the death, and advertisements I inserted in various newspapers, inquiring for the cabman who drove me home on the fatal morning, elicited no reply.
Jack Bethune dropped in to see me daily and pestered me with inquiries regarding the cause of my gloominess. Little, however, did he imagine that I had been engaged through a whole fortnight in searching patiently and methodically the registers of the great metropolitan cemeteries. To Kensal Green, Highgate, Abney Park, Nunhead, Dulwich, Brompton, Norwood, Crystal Palace, Lee, and elsewhere I went, always searching for the names of Sybil Henniker or Sybil Ridgeway. This investigation proved long and, alas! futile. I could obtain no clue whatever, all trace of her had been so carefully hidden as to defy my vigilance.
At last, however, a month after that fatal night and just when the prospect of misery which my future offered seemed too terrible for endurance, I suddenly made a discovery. It was in the London office of the Woking Cemetery Company that I found in the register an entry of an interment on the second day following the midnight ceremony, of “Sybil Ridgeway, wife of Stuart Ridgeway, of Shaftesbury Avenue.” The address whence the body was removed was not given, but, taking the next train from Waterloo to Woking, I was not long in finding, by aid of the cemetery-keeper’s plan, away in a far corner of the ground a newly-made grave.
Overcome with emotion, I stood before it in the fast-falling wintry twilight, and saw lying upon the mound of brown earth a magnificent wreath of white immortelles. Attached to it was a limp visiting-card. Eagerly I took it up and inspected it.