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I couldn't call to mind then where I had seen them before, but I suppose the shock of coming upon them so unexpectedly to-night jogged my memory." "You say that they were hanging about Mortlake's place?" asked Mr. Bell, in an interested tone. "Yes, I'm sure of it," repeated Peggy; "I'm certain of it now." "We'll soon find out," said Mr. Bell in his old determined manner.
Arthur Constant's backsliding cheered many by convincing them that others were as bad as themselves; and well-to-do tradesmen saw in Mortlake's wickedness the pernicious effects of Socialism. A dozen new theories were afloat. Constant had committed suicide by Esoteric Buddhism, as witness his devotion to Mme.
The footsteps had drawn close now and a voice could be heard saying: "What a rickety, tumble-down old place. I wonder what kind of savage lives here." "Fanning Harding!" gasped Peggy, as another voice struck in. A voice she instantly knew as Regina Mortlake's. "Oh, what a dreadful place. Why won't this miserable fog lift. I'll be dead before we get back to the hotel."
Her account of the last hours of the deceased tallied with Mortlake's, only that she feared Mortlake was quarrelling with him over something in the letter that came by the nine o'clock post. Deceased had left the house a little after Mortlake, but had returned before him, and had gone straight to his bedroom.
Everybody rose and stood in tentative attitudes, excited to the last degree. "Boys!" Peter roared on, "you all know me. I'm a plain man, and I want to know if it's likely a man would murder his best friend." "No!" in a mighty volume of sound. Wimp had scarcely calculated upon Mortlake's popularity. He stood on the platform, pale and anxious as his prisoner.
The full significance of this tragedy of a noble young life cut short had hardly time to filter into the public mind, when a fresh sensation absorbed it. Tom Mortlake had been arrested the same day at Liverpool on suspicion of being concerned in the death of his fellow-lodger. The news fell like a bombshell upon a land in which Tom Mortlake's name was a household word.
The Golden Butterfly maintained about the same altitude, but the gap between the two aerial craft was not closing up. "Mortlake's taking a desperate chance to show Lieut. Bradbury what the Cobweb can do," exclaimed Roy. "With a new engine, he's risking too much." "I guess he's seen us and means to beat us out at all hazards," conjectured Peggy. And she was right.
Tom Mortlake's evidence at the inquest added little beyond this to the public knowledge of his movements on the morning of the Mystery.
The second from Lieut. Bradbury. "If you don't mind accepting a passenger, I should be glad of a lift to Sandy Beach. I've got to make a train," explained the young officer. In five minutes the Golden Butterfly was on the sward beside the crippled Cobweb. Mortlake's face was black as night. He fulminated maledictions on the young aviators who had appeared at for him such an inopportune moment.
He was walking up Fleet Street when he ran into a man he knew a man whom Jimmy knew also; he stopped and caught him by his buttonhole. "I say, have you heard awful thing, isn't it?" Sangster stared. "Heard! Heard what?" "About Cynthia Farrow. Had a frightful accident in Mortlake's car." Sangster's eyes woke to interest. "Badly hurt?" he asked briefly. "Dead!" "My God!"
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