k,
possessed of some surgical knowledge. With Doctor Taylor, I made a
post-mortem yesterday and found everything normal. There were some
scratches and abrasions on the hands and face, but those were no doubt
due to the deceased having been flung into the brambles."

Again the grey-faced stranger craned his thin neck, listening to every
word as it fell from the doctor's lips.

And again the coroner noticed him--and wondered.

CHAPTER IV.

DESCRIBES A TORN CARD.

"The Norfolk Mystery," as it was termed by the sensational journalists
and Press-photographers, was but a nine days' wonder, as, indeed, is
every modern murder mystery.

It provided material for the sensational section of the Press for a full
week; a hundred theories were advanced, and the police started out upon
a dozen or more false scents, but all to no purpose. Therefore the
public curiosity quickly died down, and within ten days or so the affair
was forgotten amid the hundred and one other "sensations" of crime and
politics, of war rumours, and financial booms, which hourly follow upon
each other's heels and which combine to make up the strenuous unrest of
our daily life.

And so was the fatal accident to the naval aviator quickly forgotten by
the public.

Many readers of these present lines no doubt saw reports of both
affairs in the papers, but few, I expect, will recollect the actual
facts, or if they do, they little dream of the remarkable romance of
life of which those two unexplained tragedies formed the prologue.

On the night when the coroner's jury returned in the case of Richard
Harborne a verdict of "Wilful murder by some person unknown," a girl sat
in her small, plainly-furnished bedroom on the top floor of a house in
New Oxford Street, in London, holding the evening paper in her thin,
nerveless fingers.

It was Jean Libert.

She had been reading an account of the evidence given at the inquest,
devouring it eagerly, with pale face and bated breath. And as she read
her chest rose and fell quickly, her dark eyes were filled with horror,
and her lips were ashen grey. The light had faded from her pretty face,
her cheeks were sunken, her face haggard and drawn, and about her mouth
were hard lines, an expression of bitter grief, remorse, despair.

A quarter of an hour ago, while in the small, cheap French restaurant
below, kept by her father--a long, narrow place with red-plush seats
along the white walls and small tables set be