“You really cannot be too careful,” she declared. “I tell you I have once or twice experienced a strange presage of evil.”
“Oh, you make me feel quite nervy!” he declared, and then, as the air was cold, they returned to the palm-court, where Mrs. Beverley was seated.
The widow and her daughter remained in Lucerne for a fortnight, and then leaving Geoffrey to complete his work, went on by way of the Gothard to Milan.
Meanwhile Marya Pavlovitch and her father remained at the Hôtel Pilatuskulm, and both Geoffrey and Lane frequently met them. The girl-wife was most devoted to her father, who was often in a grumpy mood, as is usual with men of advanced age and slight infirmity. Young Madame Pavlovitch was naturally filled with curiosity concerning the new wireless station—for to ladies wireless is usually an enigma to be studied as part of Nature’s half-revealed problem—and several times, leaving her father, she had ascended the steep rock-girt road to the higher heights where, upon a little grass-grown plateau, the two new huts had been built.
Three weeks passed. Geoffrey completed his work, and made tests. The results were perfectly satisfactory. The telephony was reported as “R.9” over the Alps as far as Genoa, and to Marseilles, Coltano in Italy, Munich, Paris, and other places.
The range of speech was even further than what had been anticipated at the Works at Chelmsford. Other wireless systems had been tried by the Swiss Government, and had not come up to the standard required. But here the Marconi Company had scored another success over its competitors.
Since Sylvia’s departure, Geoffrey had often met young Madame Pavlovitch, sometimes on the boat between Alpnach and Lucerne, and sometimes in the streets of Lucerne, for she went there nearly every other day to obtain medicines for her father, she explained. On two occasions he had seen her enter a large detached private house in the Bruchstrasse, not far from the Synagogue. She had not, however, seen him, and he had not mentioned the matter. Yet it seemed apparent that the reason of her visits to Lucerne was to call at the house in question. And further, she always seemed annoyed whenever he met her on the way backwards or forwards along the lake.
One day Geoffrey had returned from the wireless station, and was taking his tea in the lounge, when the hotel manager came to him hurriedly and mentioned that the Colonel had been taken suddenly unwell, and that his daughter could not be found. She had gone to Lucerne after luncheon, he believed.
As the matter seemed one of urgency, and as the young Englishman was going to spend the evening in Lucerne, he resolved while on board the boat to go to the house in the Bruchstrasse, see whether Marya was there, and inform her of her father’s illness.
This he did. A rather tall, elderly man-servant opened the door, and when he inquired for Madame Pavlovitch he ushered him into a cosy, beautifully-furnished room, and without inquiring his name, closed the door and left him.