"Well, yes," she replied slowly. "Curiously enough, I saw the same person once in Paris, and again in London. I was in a taxi going along Knightsbridge on the afternoon of the day when I afterwards walked so innocently into the trap at Spring Grove. He was just coming out of the post-office in Knightsbridge, but did not notice me as I passed. I turned to look at him a second time, but he had gone in the opposite direction and his back was towards me. Yet I felt certain that he was actually the same man whom I had seen as the Ostend Express had left Petersburg. And now," she added, looking straight into my eyes, "you tell me that Edward Craig still lives!"
"He does. And he has been here—at this house—to-night!"
"At this house!" gasped the Nightingale, starting instantly to her feet, her face as pale as death.
"Yes. He has been standing on the lawn outside, peering in at this window, watching you seated at the piano," I explained.
"Watching me!"
"Yes," I replied. "And, if my surmise is correct, he is certainly no friend of yours. He has watched you during the coup in Petersburg, again in Paris, and in London, and now he has discovered your hiding-place," I answered. "What does it all mean?"
Deathly pale, with thin, quivering lips, and hands clasped helplessly before her, she stood there in an attitude of deadly fear, of blank despair.
"Yes," she whispered in a low, strained voice, full of apprehension. "I believed that he was dead, that——"
But she halted, as if suddenly recollecting that her words might betray her. Her bosom, beneath the laces of her corsage, rose and fell convulsively.
"That—what?" I asked in a soft, sympathetic voice, placing my hand tenderly upon her shoulder, and looking into her wonderful eyes.