wound so small it might have been done with a
skewer. But, with characteristic indifference, London paid but little
heed to the mysterious dramas of a sister city. A brief account of the
gruesome discovery--a figurative shrug of the shoulders as to the
incompetence of the Belgian police, who held neither a clue to the
perpetrator of the crime nor to the identity of the victim. Just a
stranger--an idler. Brussels was full of strangers just now. His
nationality? who knows? His individuality? there seemed no one to
care. The police were active no doubt, but so far they had discovered
nothing.

Two men, the murderer and the murdered, engulfed in that great
whirlpool known as humanity, small units of no importance, since no
one seemed to care. Interesting to the detective whose duty it was to
track the crime to its perpetrator. Interesting to the reporter who
could fill a column with accounts of depositions, of questionings, of
examinations. Interesting to the after-dinner talker who could
expatiate over the moral lessons to be drawn from the conception of
such a crime.

But the murdered man goes to his grave unknown: and the murderer
wanders Cain-like on the face of the earth--as mysterious, as unknown,
as silent as his victim.

CHAPTER III

AND NOW ALMOST LIKE A DREAM

Everything went on just as convention--whose mouth-piece for the
moment happened to be Lady Ryder--desired; just as Louisa surmised
that everything would; the letters of congratulations; the stately
visits from and to Lord Radclyffe, Luke's uncle; the magnificent
diamond tiara from the latter; the rope of pearls from Luke; the
silver salvers and inkstands and enamel parasol handles from everybody
who was anybody in London society.

Louisa's portrait and that of Luke hastily and cheaply reproduced in
the halfpenny dailies, so that she looked like a white negress with a
cast in her eye, and he like the mutilated hero of _L'Homme Qui Rit_;
the more elegant half-tone blocks in the sixpenny weeklies under the
popular if somewhat hackneyed heading of "The Earl of Radclyffe's heir
and his future bride, Miss Louisa Harris"; it was all there, just as
it had been for hundreds of other girls and hundreds of other young
men before Louisa had discovered that there was only one man in the
whole wide world, and that, beyond the land of diamond tiaras and of
society weddings, there was a fairy universe, immense and illimitable,
whereon the sun of happiness