“I knew a Miss Wells—a very pronounced old maid, who was a friend of hers,” answered Mrs Channing. “But she caught influenza about a year ago, and died of it. She lived in Edith Villas, Kensington.”
“And Hickman, a fair man, of middle age, with a very ugly face?”
She reflected.
“I have no recollection of ever having met him, or of hearing of him,” she answered. “Was he an intimate friend?”
“I believe so,” I said. Then, finding that she could explain nothing more, I took my leave.
Next day and the next I wandered about London aimlessly and without hope. Mabel and her mother had, for some unaccountable reason, gone abroad and carefully concealed their whereabouts. Had this fact any connexion with the mysterious tragedy that had been enacted at The Boltons? That one thought was ever uppermost in my mind.
A week passed, and I still remained at the Grand, going forth each day, wandering hither and thither, but never entering the club or going to places where I thought it likely that I might be recognised. I could not return to the life at Denbury with that angular woman at the head of my table—the woman who called herself my wife. If I returned I felt that the mystery of it all must drive me to despair, and I should, in a fit of desperation, commit suicide.
I ask any of those who read this strange history of my life, whether they consider themselves capable of remaining calm and tranquil in such circumstances, or of carefully going over all the events in their sequence and considering them with logical reasoning. I tried to do so, but in vain. For hours I sat within the hotel smoking and thinking. I was living an entirely false life, existing in the fear of recognition by unknown friends, and the constant dread that sooner or later I must return to that hated life in Devonshire.
That a hue-and-cry had been raised regarding my disappearance was plain from a paragraph which I read in one of the morning papers about ten days after my departure from Denbury. In the paragraph I was designated as “a financier well known in the City,” and it was there stated that I had left my home suddenly “after betraying signs of insanity,” and had not since been heard of.
“Insanity!” I laughed bitterly as I read those lines supplied by the Exeter correspondent of the Central News. The police had, no doubt, received my description, and were actively on the watch to trace me and restore me to my “friends.”