I lay there wondering to myself if ever again I should feel any uplifting joy or any heartrending sorrow. Ah, if women could only outgrow the child-part of their natures, hearts would not bleed so much! One of the greatest surprises in life is to discover how acutely they can ache, how they can be strained to the utmost tension, crowded with agony, and yet not break. This is moralising, and smacks of sentiment, but it is true to nature, as many of us are forced to learn.
The train roared on; the woman above me slept soundly, and I, with tears starting to my eyes, tried hard to burn the bridges leading to the past, and seek forgetfulness in sleep. The process of burning can never be accomplished, thanks to our retentive memory; but slumber came to me at last, and I must have dozed some time, for when I awoke we were in Genoa, and daylight was already showing through the chinks of the crimson blinds.
But the woman who had told the curious story slept on. Probably the spinning of so much romantic fiction had wearied her brain. The story she had related could not, of course, be true. If she were really old Keppel's ward, then what motive had he in concealing her in that gilded deck-house, which was believed to be stored with curios? Who, too, was that unseen man whom he had apparently taken into his confidence—the man who had promised assistance by blowing up the yacht, with all hands?
I shuddered at the thought of that dastardly plot.
Yet Keppel had been declared by this unknown person to be the murderer of the woman now lying in the berth above me. Why?
The train was at a standstill, and I rose to peep out. As I turned to re-enter my berth, my eyes fell upon the sleeping form of my companion. Her face was turned towards me, and her opened bodice disclosed a delicate white throat and neck.
I bent quickly to examine more closely what I saw there. Upon the throat were two dark marks, one on either side—the marks of a human finger and a thumb—an exact repetition of the puzzling marks that had been found upon the throat of poor Reggie!
CHAPTER XXII
IS MORE ASTONISHING
So still, so pale, and so bloodless were my mysterious companion's lips, that at the first moment I feared she might be dead. Her appearance was that of a corpse. But after careful watching I saw that she was breathing lightly, but regularly, and thus I became satisfied.