As I stood watching unseen, a waiter approached, spoke to him, and then he followed the man upstairs to the presence of my adored.
Had I done wrong in allowing the fellow to go to her alone? That was the thought which next moment seized me. Yet when I recollected her earnest appeal I could only remain lost in wonderment at her motive. But determined on watching the man in secret, I fetched my hat and overcoat, and sat patiently in the hall to await his return.
The clock chimed eleven musically, and a party of Americans noisily left to catch the night mail to London. The staff changed, the night-porter came on duty, and the little group of idlers in the hall gradually diminished. Indeed, they grew so few that I feared in passing out he might recognise me. Therefore at half-past eleven I strode forth into the night. Princes Street with its long line of lights, looked bright and pleasant even at that hour, yet it was almost deserted save for one or two belated wayfarers.
I took up my position at the railings on the opposite side of the road, from where I could see each person emerging from the hotel. Long and anxiously I waited, wondering what was transpiring in that room the window of which was straight before me. The blind was down, but no shadow was cast upon it, so I could surmise nothing.
At last he came. For a moment he stood on the steps, evidently in hesitation. Then he descended and hurried away. I followed him closely, across the railway, up High Street, and then he plunged into an intricate labyrinth of narrow streets quite unknown to me. At the time I believed he was not aware that I was following him, but when I recollect how cleverly he evaded me I now quite recognise that he must have detected my presence from the first. At any rate, after leading me through a number of narrow thoroughfares in a low quarter of the city, he suddenly turned a corner and disappeared from my sight as completely as though he had vanished into air.
My own idea is that he disappeared into a house—probably into one of those whose doors are open always as a refuge for thieves, and there are many in every big city in the kingdom, houses where pressure on the door causes it to yield and close again noiselessly, and from which there is an exit into another thoroughfare.
I spent some little time in making an examination of the houses at the spot where he had so suddenly become lost, but finding myself baffled, turned, and after wandering for a full half-hour lost in those crooked streets of old Edinburgh, I at last found myself in a thoroughfare I recognised, and turned to the hotel more than ever convinced of the man’s shrewdness.
Next morning, at ten o’clock, I found Lolita alone in her sitting-room, and on entering saw by her countenance that the night had, for her, been a sleepless one.
“Well,” I said, raising her hand reverently to my lips as was my wont, “and what was the result of last night’s interview?”
She drew a long breath, shook her head sadly, and replied—