Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 42).djvu/460

"I could not think where I had seen him before." glanced in her direction. So far as I saw, he was so absorbed in his meal that he scarcely raised his eyes from the table. I knew, unfortunately, that I could not have mistaken the words which I had seen his lips forming. I tried to comfort myself with the reflection that they could not have referred to the vision of feminine loveliness which had just passed from the room.

The following morning I travelled by the early boat-train to Dover. When the train had left the station I looked at my Telegraph. I read a good deal of it; then, at the top of a column on one of the inside pages, I came upon a paragraph headed: "Mysterious Affair at the Embankment Hotel." Not very long after midnight—in time, it seemed, to reach the paper before it went to press—the body of a young woman had been found in the courtyard of the hotel. She was in her night attire. She was recognized as one of the guests who had been staying in the hotel; she had either fallen or been thrown out of her bedroom window.