rd, in natural anger at his
proceedings towards herself. I applied it to him with the deliberate
conviction that his vocation in life was the vocation of a spy. On
this assumption, the reason for his extraordinary stay in England so
long after the objects of the conspiracy had been gained, became, to my
mind, quite intelligible.

The year of which I am now writing was the year of the famous Crystal
Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park. Foreigners in unusually large numbers
had arrived already, and were still arriving in England. Men were
among us by hundreds whom the ceaseless distrustfulness of their
governments had followed privately, by means of appointed agents, to
our shores. My surmises did not for a moment class a man of the
Count's abilities and social position with the ordinary rank and file
of foreign spies. I suspected him of holding a position of authority,
of being entrusted by the government which he secretly served with the
organisation and management of agents specially employed in this
country, both men and women, and I believed Mrs. Rubelle, who had been
so opportunely found to act as nurse at Blackwater Park, to be, in all
probability, one of the number.

Assuming that this idea of mine had a foundation in truth, the position
of the Count might prove to be more assailable than I had hitherto
ventured to hope. To whom could I apply to know something more of the
man's history and of the man himself than I knew now?

In this emergency it naturally occurred to my mind that a countryman of
his own, on whom I could rely, might be the fittest person to help me.
The first man whom I thought of under these circumstances was also the
only Italian with whom I was intimately acquainted--my quaint little
friend, Professor Pesca.

The professor has been so long absent from these pages that he has run
some risk of being forgotten altogether.

It is the necessary law of such a story as mine that the persons
concerned in it only appear when the course of events takes them
up--they come and go, not by favour of my personal partiality, but by
right of their direct connection with the circumstances to be detailed.
For this reason, not Pesca alone, but my mother and sister as well,
have been left far in the background of the narrative. My visits to
the Hampstead cottage, my mother's belief in the denial of Laura's
identity which the conspiracy had accomplished, my vain efforts to
overcome the prejudice on her pa