the road, m'sieur," she said, as we
went along.

"I'm a constant traveller," I replied, with a laugh. "A little too
constant, perhaps. One gets wearied with such continual travel as I am
forced to undertake. I never know to-morrow where I may be, and I move
swiftly from one place to another, never spending more than a day or two
in the same place."

I did not, for obvious reasons, tell her my profession.

"But it must be very pleasant to travel so much," she declared. "I would
love to be able to do so. I'm passionately fond of constant change."

Together we went on to Boulogne, crossed to Folkestone, and that same
night at midnight entered London.

On our journey she gave me an address in the Vauxhall Bridge Road,
where, she said, a letter would find her. She refused to tell me her
destination or to allow me to see her into a hansom. This latter fact
caused me considerable reflection. Why had she so suddenly made up her
mind to come to London? and why should I not know whither she went, when
she had told me so many details concerning herself?

Of one fact I felt quite convinced--namely, that she had lied to me. She
was not a governess, as she pretended. Besides, I had been seized by
suspicion that a tall, thin-faced elderly man, rather shabbily dressed,
whom I had noticed idling in the Rue Royale, had followed us by rail. I
thought I saw him outside the Tivoli, in the Strand, where she
descended.

His reappearance there recalled to me that he had watched us in the Rue
Royale, and had appeared intensely interested in all our movements.
Whether my pretty travelling-companion noticed him I do not know. I,
however, watched her as she walked along the Strand carrying her
dressing-bag, and saw the tall man striding after her. Adventurer was
written upon the fellow's face. His grey moustache was upturned, and his
keen grey eyes looked out from beneath shaggy brows, while his dark
threadbare overcoat was tightly buttoned across his chest for greater
warmth.

Without approaching her, he stood back in the shadow, and saw her enter
a hansom and drive towards Charing Cross. It was clear that she was not
going to the address she had given me, for she was driving in the
opposite direction.

My duty was to drive direct to Clifford Street and report to Bindo, but
so interested was I in the thin-faced watcher that I turned the car into
the courtyard of the Cecil in the Strand and left it there, in order to
keep further obser