“I don’t know at all. I suppose he’s in the East. I haven’t seen him since he came to the shop to say good-bye to me.”
“I wonder if the Doctor and his daughter have returned to their own country?” he suggested.
“What! Have you heard nothing of them?”
“Nothing,” he replied. “I have endeavoured to discover where their furniture was taken, or where they themselves went, but all has been in vain. Both they and their belongings have entirely disappeared.”
The girl did not utter a word. She was leaning back, with her fine eyes fixed straight before her, reflecting deeply.
“It is all very extraordinary,” she remarked at last.
“Yes. I only wish, darling, you were at liberty to tell me the whole truth regarding Maud, and what she has told you,” he said, his gaze fixed upon her pale, beautiful face.
“I cannot do that, Max,” was her prompt answer, “so please do not ask me. I have already told you that in this matter my lips are sealed by a solemn promise—a promise which I cannot break.”
“I know! Yet I somehow cannot help thinking that you could reveal to me some fact which might expose the motive of this strange and unaccountable disappearance,” he said. “Do you know, I cannot get rid of the suspicion that the Doctor, and possibly Maud herself, have been victims of foul play. Remember that as a politician he had many enemies in his own country. A political career in the Balkans is not the peaceful profession it is here at St. Stephen’s. Take Bulgaria, for instance, and recall the political assassinations of Stambuloff, Petkoff, and a dozen others. The same in Servia and in Roumania. The whole of the Balkans is permeated by an air of political conspiracy, for there life is indeed cheap, more especially the life of the public man.”
“What! Then you really suspect that both Maud and her father have actually been the victims of some political plot?” she asked, regarding him with a strange expression.