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"Here five days have gone by, and there isn't a sign of Jack Osborne, though he had not told anybody that he intended to absent himself, had not even hinted to anybody that he had any idea of doing so." "You say he has not been seen since Gastrell's reception?" "Not since then five days ago.
Many strange things had happened since Christmas, but this, surely, was the strangest thing of all, that Jack Osborne, who had persuaded me to help him in his self-imposed task of tracking down these people, should actually have come under the spell of Jasmine Gastrell's beauty and undeniable fascination.
"If we cross by the same boat as they do," I said suddenly, "we shall be recognized." He smiled grimly. "Not if you disguise yourself as you did at Hugesson Gastrell's the other night," he said. "Good heavens!" I exclaimed, "how do you know that?" He looked to right and left, then behind him. Nobody was near.
It was the evening of Hugesson Gastrell's house warming reception in his newly furnished mansion in Cumberland Place, and the muster of well-known people was extraordinary.
Dick was being taken away by the dark, demure, quietly-dressed little woman I had seen at Connie Stapleton's dinner party, and, only the night before, standing among the onlookers in Gastrell's house in Cumberland Place. They walked leisurely along the platform, Dick still carrying his suit-case, and at the end of it passed down the sloping sub-way which leads to the Metropolitan Railway.
Stapleton's other guests were I mentally upbraided myself for having come, or rather, for having let Dulcie come. The first to whom our hostess introduced Dulcie was "Mrs. Gastrell," and directly afterwards she presented to Dulcie "Mrs. Gastrell's cousin," as she called him none other than Hugesson Gastrell, who was standing by.
"You certainly were fortunate, in a sense," I answered, marvelling at her self-possession, and mentally asking myself if she spoke with conviction and whether I had, after all, formed a wrong opinion about her as well as about our hostess. Then I heard Gastrell's voice behind me, and that brought me to my senses. If such a man were a guest of Mrs.
They seemed, however, pleasant fellows, and presently he had drifted into conversation with them, or they with him, and with his fair companion Jack, as I have said, is extremely cosmopolitan, and picks up all sorts of acquaintances. I could well believe that at a reception such as Gastrell's he would waive all formality of introduction if he found himself with companionable strangers.
For here was Lord Easterton's friend, Hugesson Gastrell, whom Easterton had told us he had met frequently in London during the past month; here was Jack Osborne claiming to be acquainted with a man named Gastrell, whom he had met on his way home from Africa, and who, as he put it to us afterwards, was "the dead facsimile" of Easterton's guest; and here was I with a distinct recollection of a man called Gastrell who well, the more I stared at Easterton's guest the more mystified I felt at this Hugesson Gastrell's declaring that he was not my Geneva companion; indeed that we had never met before, and that he had never been in Geneva.
With the help of the pistol glow-light I made my way back to the tree where a few minutes before I had been propped up, helpless. On the ground, close to the trunk, Gastrell's body lay huddled in a heap, a red spot in the middle of his forehead showing that death must indeed have been instantaneous. I had, however, no time for reflection.
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