“Then one morning Stanley received a telegram. When he read it he became both confused and alarmed. He did not show me the message, but told me that it was imperative that he should return to London at once. I now recollect that we were in the hall of the Kürhaus when the concierge handed him the message, and seated in his invalid chair, near the big stove on the right, was old Mr. Humphreys, whom I did not then know, but who was no doubt watching us intently.”
“He had followed you to Mürren with a very definite object,” Feng went on. “He must have been watching you for some months beforehand, and I have no doubt your sudden marriage was a severe blow to his plans.
“I had serious difficulty in making friends with him. Of course he knew I was a Chinese and I really believe that he suspected at first that I was an agent of the Thu-tseng. It was only when he found that I had been at Mürren some time before Thelma and Audley arrived—and therefore, he thought, could not be specially interested in them—that I succeeded in getting inside his guard. Of course, by posing as his friend, I was able much more easily to keep track of his movements.
“Do you remember your escape from the avalanche?”
“Rather!” said Thelma and I simultaneously.
“Perhaps you will be surprised to learn that that avalanche was not the unaided work of Nature,” said the doctor. “You did not notice a man some hundreds of feet above you?”
“No,” I said, “but what do you mean?”
“It’s a very easy thing to start an avalanche,” said Feng with a smile. “There was a man above you that day and the avalanche was started deliberately. Your guide John found out the truth afterwards. But the would-be assassin—I have no doubt he was in the pay of Humphreys—was never traced and the matter was hushed up. It would not have done to let Humphreys know that the truth was suspected. As a matter of fact I did suspect it and implored John to investigate.
“But with regard to Stanley Audley I confess I was completely misled. When he received that telegram recalling him to London I believed that the story he had told you about his profession as electrical engineer, was a true one. Only when it was proved to be without foundation did I see that I, like yourself, had been cleverly bamboozled. Until then I had believed Audley to be what he represented himself to be. I never dreamed of the truth. Hartley Humphreys, a crook to his finger tips, possessed a master-mind, obsessed by criminality, and having no idea of my actual purpose he acted with such amazing cunning and forethought that he must be placed among the list of the master-criminals of the world.”
“Of course I had no suspicion,” said Thelma. “I didn’t even know that I was an heiress.”