passing faintness. I don’t think I quite catch your meaning. What did you say enabled you to identify the picture?”
“This word—‘Helen’—was written on the back. Didn’t I tell you her name was Helen? Yes; Helen Vaughan.”
Clarke groaned; there could be no shadow of doubt.
“Now, don’t you agree with me,” said Villiers, “that in the story I have told you tonight, and in the part this woman plays in it, there are some very strange points?”
“Yes, Villiers,” Clarke muttered, “it is a strange story indeed; a strange story indeed. You must give me time to think it over; I may be able to help you or I may not. Must you be going now? Well, good-night, Villiers, good-night. Come and see me in the course of a week.”
THE LETTER OF ADVICE 
“Do you know, Austin,” said Villiers, as the two friends were pacing sedately along Piccadilly one pleasant morning in May, “do you know I am convinced that what you told me about Paul Street and the Herberts is a mere episode in an extraordinary history? I may as well confess to you that when I asked you about Herbert a few months ago I had just seen him.”
“You had seen him? Where?”
“He begged of me in the street one night. He was in the most pitiable plight, but I recognized the man, and I got him to tell me his history, or at least the outline of it. In brief, it amounted to this—he had been ruined by his wife.”
“In what manner?”
“He would not tell me; he would only say that she had destroyed him, body and soul. The man is dead now.”
“And what has become of his wife?”
“Ah, that’s what I should like to know, and I mean to find her sooner or later. I know a man named Clarke, a dry fellow, in fact a man of business, but shrewd enough. You understand my meaning; not shrewd in the mere business sense of the word, but a man who really knows something about men and life. Well, I laid the case before him, and he was evidently impressed. He said it needed consideration, and asked me to come again in the course of a week. A few days later I received this extraordinary letter.”
Austin took the envelope, drew out the letter, and read it curiously. It ran as follows:—
“MY DEAR VILLIERS,—I have thought over the matter on which you consulted me the other night, and my advice to you is this. Throw the portrait into the fire, blot out the story from your mind. Never give it another thought, Villiers, or you will be sorry. You will think, no doubt, that I am in possession of some secret information, and to a certain extent that is the case. But I only know a little; I am like a traveller who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror. What I know is strange enough and horrible enough, but beyond my knowledge there are depths and horrors more frightful still, more incredible than any tale told of winter nights about the fire. I have 

 Prev. P 21/49 next