CHAPTER V THE MYSTERY THICKENS When I regained the bridge I crossed to the further parapet and looked down at the river. I could see nothing of the boat; doubtless it had passed out of sight behind a string of barges that lay in the tideway. As I watched, the moon was veiled again by the clouds that rolled up from the west, heralding a second storm; and in another minute or so a fresh deluge had commenced. W But I scarcely heeded it. I leaned against the parapet staring at the dark, mysterious river and the lights that fringed and spanned it like strings of blurred jewels, seen mistily through the driving rain. I was bareheaded, for the fierce gust of wind that came as harbinger of the squall had swept off my hat and whirled it into the water, where doubtless it would be carried down-stream, on the swiftly ebbing tide, in the wake of that boat which was hastening—whither? I don’t think I knew at the time that my hat was gone. I have lived through some strange and terrible experiences; but I have seldom suffered more mental agony than I did during those few minutes that I stood in the rain on Westminster Bridge. I was trembling from head to foot, my soul was sick, my mind distracted by the effort to find any plausible explanation of the scene I had just witnessed. [Pg 34] [Pg 34] What was this mystery that encompassed the girl I loved; that had closed around her now? A mystery that I had never even suspected till a few hours ago, though I had seen Anne every day for this month past,—ever since I first met her. But, after all, what did I know of her antecedents? Next to nothing; and that I had learned mainly from my cousin Mary. Now I came to think of it, Anne had told me very little about herself. I knew that her father, Anthony Pendennis, came of an old family, and possessed a house and estate in the west of England, which he had let on a long lease. Anne had never seen her ancestral home, for her father lived a nomadic existence on the Continent; one which she had shared, since she left the school at Neuilly, where she and Mary first became friends. I gathered that she and her father were devoted to each other; and that he had spared her unwillingly for this long-promised visit to her old
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