registers of the great metropolitan cemeteries. To Kensal Green, Highgate, Abney Park, Nunhead, Dulwich, Brompton, Norwood, Crystal Palace, Lee, and elsewhere I went, always searching for the names of Sybil Henniker or Sybil Ridgeway. This investigation proved long and, alas! futile. I could obtain no clue whatever, all trace of her had been so carefully hidden as to defy my vigilance.

At last, however, a month after that fatal night and just when the prospect of misery which my future offered seemed too terrible for endurance, I suddenly made a discovery. It was in the London office of the Woking Cemetery Company that I found in the register an entry of an interment on the second day following the midnight ceremony, of “Sybil Ridgeway, wife of Stuart Ridgeway, of Shaftesbury Avenue.” The address whence the body was removed was not given, but, taking the next train from Waterloo to Woking, I was not long in finding, by aid of the cemetery-keeper’s plan, away in a far corner of the ground a newly-made grave.

Overcome with emotion, I stood before it in the fast-falling wintry twilight, and saw lying upon the mound of brown earth a magnificent wreath of white immortelles. Attached to it was a limp visiting-card. Eagerly I took it up and inspected it.

Upon it, traced in ink that had become blurred and half-effaced by the rain, there appeared some words. As I read them they seemed to glow in letters of fire; they held me spell-bound.

I lost courage to pursue my cold, calm, reasonable deductions; a kind of hallucination came upon me—a mental picture of her tragic end—and I felt my reason reel.

A vertigo of terror seized me, as though the breath of destiny swept over my brow.

The card secured to the great wreath was my own—the one I had given Sybil on the first evening we had met in the Casino Garden—but the words written upon it amazed me. I stood breathless, dumbfounded, holding it between my trembling fingers, utterly unable to realise the truth.

A portion of the writing upon it was in a well-formed man’s hand, the remainder in a heavy calligraphy totally different. The rains had rendered the writing faint and brown, yet in the fast-falling gloom I was enabled to decipher that one side bore the inscription—

“From your heart-broken husband—Stuart.”

Then, turning it over, I read in a distinctly feminine hand the strange exhortation—

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