s. Moreover, they would
hear all about it at full length presently. As for the crowd--it had
no business to know too much.

They hustled the excited driver back on to his box, and themselves got
into the cab beside it--the dead man, stabbed in the neck from ear to
ear--the wound quite small as if it had been done with a skewer.

The _gardiens_ ordered the chauffeur to drive to the commissariat, and
Louisa turned away with a slight shiver down her spine and her throat
choked with the horror of what she had only guessed.

CHAPTER II

ONCE MORE THE OBVIOUS

You don't suppose for a moment, I hope, that a girl like Louisa would
allow her mind to dwell on such horrors. Mysterious crimes in strange
cities--and in London, too, for a matter of that--are, alas! of far
too frequent occurrence to be quite as startling as they should be.

A day or two later, Louisa Harris and her aunt, Lady Ryder, crossed
over to England. They had spent five weeks in Italy and one in
Brussels, not with a view to dreaming over the beauties of the Italian
Lakes, or over the art treasures collected in the museums of Brussels,
but because Lady Ryder had had a bronchial catarrh which she could not
shake off and so her doctor had ordered her a thorough change.
Bellaggio was selected, and Louisa accompanied her. They stayed at the
best hotels both in Bellaggio and in Brussels, where Lady Ryder had
several friends whom she wished to visit before she went home.

Nothing whatever happened that should not have happened; everything
was orderly and well managed; the courier and the maid saw to tickets
and to luggage, to hotel rooms and sleeping compartments. It was
obviously their mission in life to see that nothing untoward or
unexpected happened, but only the obvious.

It was clearly not their fault that Miss Harris had seen a cab in
which an unknown man happened to have been murdered.

Louisa, with a view to preventing her aunt from going to sleep after
dinner and thereby spoiling her night's rest, had told her of the
incident which she had witnessed in the Boulevard Waterloo, and Lady
Ryder was genuinely shocked. She vaguely felt that her niece had done
something unladylike and odd, which was so unlike Louisa.

The latter had amused herself by scanning a number of English papers
in order to find out what was said in London about that strange crime,
which she had almost witnessed--the man stabbed through the neck, from
ear to ear, and the