llow sands after all.

Sub-Chapter IX.

AFTERWARDS.

The mysterious disappearance of the dazzling Duc de Septimominorelli
created a profound impression throughout civilised Europe. The Donna
Velvetina Peeleretta was inconsolable.

After a while she, too, went abroad.

Sub-Chapter X.

THE SLEUTH-HOUND AGAIN.

Many, many years flew past.

Solomon Smellie's youngest son had been twice Lord Mayor of London, and
all London had forgotten the Duc de Septimominorelli and the peerless
Donna Velvetina Peeleretta.

All? No, there was one exception.

An aged man in a back room of the Mansion House sometimes produced a
plaster cast from the recesses of his pocket, and muttered to himself--

"A time will come--aha!"

Sub-Chapter XI.

THE DESERT JOURNEY.

A lonely traveller traversed the sandy desert wastes of Central Africa.
He was ill-accoutred for so trying a journey, having only a cane to
protect himself from the wild beasts, and patent-leather shoes on his
feet. No one knew his name; and what made him more mysterious was that,
although he spoke English, he paid for everything in Spanish doubloons
half a century old!

What could his errand be, amid the typhoons and siroccos of that
desolate continent?

For six weeks he had not moistened his parched lips with so much as a
drop of water! And his only food had been dried elephant!

Yet he kept his eyes fixed on the mountain range twelve hundred leagues
ahead of him; and as each day brought him fifty miles nearer (for he was
evidently a practised walker), he murmured to himself, "I come,
Velvetina!" and thought nothing of the fatigue.

The man's shoes were unequal to his spirit, and within a hundred miles
of his goal he sunk crippled to the ground. The blinding sand swept
over him in mountains, and the tropical sun made the end of the cane he
carried red-hot.

Any other man in such a condition would have succumbed. Not so our
mysterious traveller.

If he could not walk, he could roll. And he rolled.

Sub-Chapter XII.

THREE CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON.

On the summit of the topmost of those gigantic mountains, the peak of
which is lost high in the depths of the cloudless sky, a female stands,
and gazes southward.

Her fair form is mysteriously draped in white, and the parasol with
which she shuts out the scorching sun from her face effectually conceals
her features.

"He cometh--he cometh not," says she, weeping.

At length, in the remote horizon