Charles Norris Williamson - British Murder Mysteries – 10 Novels in One Volume

"This has hurt and shocked you, too," he said. "There is one thing I must say to you, and it is this: it is only for her father that I care. I want her to be happy in her own way. We did not suit each other."

"I used sometimes to think not," Joan answered in a voice genuinely broken. "I used to be afraid that--if you should ever marry--you would not have been happy. Perhaps she--wasn't the right one for you."

Her eyes were downcast, but the compelling power of love in the man's caught them up to his and held them.

"I have known that she wasn't the right one for a long time," he said. "I have known the right one, and it is you. I love you with all my heart. I want you. You are the one woman on earth for me. I hadn't meant to say this now, but--I can't let you go out of my life. I must do all I can to keep you always."

"Don't!" gasped Joan. "Don't! it will kill me. Oh, if you only knew, how you would hate me!"

"Nothing could make me hate you."

"Yes. Wait!" And then Joan poured out the whole story--not only of this last fraud, but of all the frauds; the story of her "career."

He listened to the end, without interrupting her once. Then, at last, when the strange tale was finished, and the pale girl was silent from sheer exhaustion of the hopeless spirit tasting its punishment in purgatory, he held out his arms.

"Poor, little, lonely girl!" he said. "How sorry I am for you! How I want to comfort and take care of you all the rest of your life, so that it may be clear and white, as your true self would have it be! And--how glad I am that you're not a widowed Comtesse!"

She was in his arms still when a knock at the door roused them both from the first dream of real happiness the girl had ever known.

A servant brought a card. She took it from the tray and read it out mechanically: "Mr. George Gallon."

"Tell the gentleman----" she had begun; but before she could go further with her instructions George Gallon himself had entered the room.

"Well, Miss Carthew," he said, "I heard from an unexpected source that you were here, swaggering about as the widow of a French Comte. I needed a little holiday, and so I ran out to see whether you were a greater success as a Comtesse than you were as a typewriter in my office. Oh! I beg your pardon. You're not alone. I'm afraid I may have surprised your friend with some disagreeable news."

"Not at all," said Justin Wentworth calmly. "Miss Carthew has not only told me of that episode in her life, but how it became necessary for her to take up the position of a typewriter. Your treatment of her seemed almost incredible--until I saw you. No wonder it was necessary for Miss Carthew to adopt an alias , if this is the sort of persecution she is subject to under her own name. But in future it will be different. As Lady Wentworth she will be safe even from cads like you; and though she is not yet my wife, I'm thankful to say I have even now the right to protect her. When do you intend to leave Biarritz, Mr. Gallon?"

"'When do you intend to leave Biarritz?'"

George opened his lips furiously, but snapped them shut again. Then, having paused to reflect, he said: "I am here only for an hour. I'm going on to Spain."

"Pray watch over your tongue in that hour," returned Wentworth.

Then George Gallon was gone.

"I'll worship you all my life on my knees," said Joan. "I'm not worthy to touch your hand. But I will be. I will be a new self."

"Only the best of the old one, that is all I want," answered her lover. "The past is like a garment which you wore for protection against the storm. But there will be no more storms after this."

"Because you have forgiven me, because you believe in me," cried Joan, "you will make of me the woman you would have me!"

"The woman you really are, or I would not have loved you," he said.

And so it was that Joan Carthew's career ended and her life began.

Table of Contents

I. A White Rose

II. Smiths and Smiths

III. Why She Came

IV. The Great Moment

V. The Second Latchkey

VI. The Beginning—or the End?

VII. The Countess De Santiago

VIII. The Blue Diamond Ring

IX. The Thing Knight Wanted

X. Beginning of the Series

XI. Annesley Remembers

XII. The Crystal

XIII. The Series Goes On

XIV. The Test

XV. Nelson Smith at Home

XVI. Why Ruthven Smith Went

XVII. Ruthven Smith's Eyeglasses

XVIII. The Star Sapphire

XIX. The Secret

XX. The Plan

XXI. The Devil's Rosary

XXII. Destiny and the Waldos

XXIII. The Thin Wall

XXIV. The Anniversary

XXV. The Allegory

XXVI. The Three Words

“‘Stop! He’s my lover!’ she cried. ‘Don’t shoot!’”

Table of Contents

Even when Annesley Grayle turned out of the Strand toward the Savoy she was uncertain whether she would have courage to walk into the hotel. With each step the thing, the dreadful thing, that she had come to do, loomed blacker. It was monstrous, impossible, like opening the door of the lions' cage at the Zoo and stepping inside.

There was time still to change her mind. She had only to turn now ... jump into an omnibus ... jump out again at the familiar corner, and everything would be as it had been. Life for the next five, ten, maybe twenty years, would be what the last five had been.

At the thought of the Savoy and the adventure waiting there, the girl's skin had tingled and grown hot, as if a wind laden with grains of heated sand had blown over her. But at the thought of turning back, of going "home"—oh, misused word!—a leaden coldness shut her spirit into a tomb.

She had walked fast, after descending at Bedford Street from a fierce motor-bus with a party of comfortable people, bound for the Adelphi Theatre. Never before had she been in a motor-omnibus, and she was not sure whether the great hurtling thing would deign to stop, except at trysting-places of its own; so it had seemed wise to bundle out rather than risk a snub from the conductor, who looked like pictures of the Duke of Wellington.

But in the lighted Strand she had been stared at as well as jostled: a girl alone at eight o'clock on a winter evening, bare-headed, conspicuously tall if conspicuous in no other way; dressed for dinner or the theatre in a pale gray, sequined gown under a mauve chiffon cloak meant for warm nights of summer.

Of course, as Mrs. Ellsworth (giver of dress and wrap) often pointed out, "beggars mustn't be choosers"; and Annesley Grayle was worse off than a beggar, because beggars needn't keep up appearances. She should have thanked Heaven for good clothes, and so she did in chastened moods; but it was a costume to make a girl hurry through the Strand, and just for an instant she had been glad to turn from the white glare into comparative dimness.

That was because offensive eyes had made her forget the almost immediate future in the quite immediate present. But the hotel, with light-hearted taxis tearing up to it, brought remembrance with a shock. She envied everyone else who was bound for the Savoy, even old women, and fat gentlemen with large noses. They were going there because they wanted to go, for their pleasure. Nobody in the world could be in such an appalling situation as she was.

It was then that Annesley's feet began to drag, and she slowed her steps to gain more time to think. Could she— could she do the thing?