“Well,” I asked anxiously, as I entered the square hall of the club, “what news?”
“She’s alive,” he said. “She saw your advertisement and has replied!”
“Thank heaven!” I gasped. “Where is she?”
“Here is the address,” and he drew from his pocket-book a slip of paper, with the words written in Natalia’s own hand: “Miss Stebbing, Glendevon House, Lochearnhead, Perthshire.” And with it he handed the note which had come to the club and which he had opened—a few brief words merely enclosing her address and telling me to exercise the greatest caution in approaching her. “I have been watched by very suspicious persons,” she added, “and so I am in hiding here. When you can come, do so. I am extremely anxious to see you.”
“What do you make of that?” I asked the famous police official.
“That she scented danger and escaped,” he replied. “My first intention was to go up to Scotland to see her, but on reflection I thought, sir, that you might prefer to go alone.”
“I do. I shall leave Euston by the mail to-night and shall be there to-morrow morning. She has, I see assumed another name.”
“Yes, and she has certainly gone to an outlandish spot where no one would have thought of searching for her.”
“Drury suggested it, without a doubt. He knows Scotland so well,” I said.
Therefore yet another night I spent in a sleeping-car between Euston and Perth, eating scones for breakfast in the Station Hotel at the latter place, and leaving an hour later by way of Crieff and St. Fillans, to the beautiful bank of Loch Earn, lying calm and blue in the spring sunshine.