I took her unresisting hand, and told her how long ago I had loved her, not daring to expose to her the great secret of my heart. If we had mutually decided upon marriage, and I had deliberately deserted her, it was, I declared, because of that remarkable unconsciousness which had blotted out all knowledge of my life previous to that last night when we had dined together, and I had accompanied the man Hickman to his lodgings.
“But tell me all,” she urged, “so that I can understand and judge accordingly.”
And then, beginning at the beginning, I recounted the whole of the amazing facts, just as I have narrated them to the reader in these foregoing chapters.
I think the telling occupied most part of an hour; but she sat there, her lovely eyes fixed upon me, her mouth half open, held dumb and motionless by the strange story I unfolded. Once or twice she gave vent to ejaculations of surprise, and I saw that only by dint of supreme effort did she succeed in preserving her self-control. I told her everything. I did not seek to conceal one single fact.
“And he was actually murdered in my house?” she cried, starting up at last. “You were present?”
I explained to her in detail the events of that fateful night.
“Then at last the truth is plain!” she exclaimed. “You have supplied the key to the enigma for which I have been so long in search!”
“Tell me,” I said, in breathless earnestness. “All these years I have been striving in vain to solve the problem.”
She paused, her dark, fathomless eyes fixed upon me, as though lacking courage to tell me the truth.
“I deceived you, Wilford, from the first,” she faltered, “I hid from you the secret of my birth, and it was at my request Colonel Channing—who, of course, knew me well when he was British Attaché at Vienna—refused to tell you the truth. You wonder, of course, that I should live in England incognita. Probably, however, you know that my poor mother, the late Empress, loved England and the English. She gave me an English name at my baptism, and when only five years of age I was sent here to be educated. At seventeen I returned to Vienna, but soon became tired of the eternal glitter of palace life, and a year or two later, as soon as I was of age and my own mistress, I returned to London, took into my service Mrs Anson, the widow of an English officer well known to my mother, and in order to preserve my incognita caused her to pass as my mother. I took the house at The Boltons, and only Colonel and Mrs Channing knew my real station. I was passionately fond of music, and desired to complete my studies, besides which I am intensely fond of London and of life unfettered by the trammels which must hamper the daughter of an Emperor.”