Somebody has truly said that love is blind. Well, I loved Roseye. And my blindness had been a very pleasant and delightful affliction up to that tragic day of her disappearance.
Through those weeks when her mind had remained unbalanced and unhinged, she had never once made any statement nor had she ever inadvertently admitted anything which might reveal the truth as to where she had been, or the identity of the person whom she held in greatest terror—that Woman with the Leopard’s Eyes.
With all the cunning I possessed I had sought to glean from her some fact, any fact however vague, concerning those weeks when she had been missing, but beyond what I have written in these pages, I could gather no single incident.
I was but an ordinary man—one whose father had risen in the medical profession to grasp one of its plums. From being a ne’er-do-well and idler, I had taken up aviation and, after much perseverance, had learned to fly. I suppose I was gifted with ordinary intelligence, and that intelligence had shown me that, now we were at war, the enemy had placed upon the whole country that secret Hand, eager and clutching, to effect and secure our undoing. Its finger-prints, indelible and unmistakable, remained wherever one sought them.
That Hand had been upon me when I had crashed to earth with a wooden bolt in my machine in place of one of steel.
But whether the Hand had really been placed upon Roseye was a problem which utterly defied solution.
That she had suffered had been vividly apparent, yet her absolute and fixed refusal to say anything, to admit anything, or to make any charge against anyone, was, in itself, an astounding feature of what was an extremely curious situation.
I remained that afternoon at Burford Bridge just as dumbfounded and mystified as I had been at that moment when Theed had opened the door of my sitting-room and she had returned from what, in her own words, had been a living tomb.
Why a living tomb? Who had prepared the trap—if trap there had been? Who was the unknown woman, the very mention of whom terrified her—the Woman with the Leopard’s Eyes?
Though we sat there and laughed together—for I had affected, I hope successfully, an utter disregard of any suspicion or jealousy of Eastwell—I gazed upon her, and I saw that she had grown nervous and anxious.