“Was she old or young?”
“Elderly, with grey hair. A rather stiff, formal kind of person.”
“Where have they gone?”
“I heard Mrs Rumbold say that she wanted to go to Oban. So perhaps they’ve gone there.”
There was a boat down to Oban in three hours’ time, therefore I took it, passed down the beautiful Loch and by the island of Lismore, places too well known to the traveller in Scotland to need any description, and that same evening found myself in Oban, the Charing Cross of the Highlands. I had been there several times before, and always stayed at the Great Western. Therefore I took the hotel omnibus, and on alighting asked if a Mrs Rumbold was staying there.
The reply was a negative one, therefore I went round to several other hotels, finding at last that she and “her maid” had taken a room at the Alexandra that morning, but had suddenly changed their plans, and had left at two o’clock by train for the south, but whether for Glasgow or Edinburgh was not known.
I therefore lost track of them. Sybil had apparently successfully escaped from her male visitor at Glasgow, while at the same time Mrs Rumbold—probably the mother of the man she loved in secret—had awaited her up at Fort William.
For what reason? Why was she now masquerading as maid of the mother of her lover?
Again, if her visitor in Glasgow was really Parham, he must have very quickly obtained knowledge of her whereabouts, for only a few days before I had watched him arrange that ingenious plot against her in Dean’s Yard—a plot which would have no doubt been carried into execution if Sybil had been present.
I hesitated how to act.