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n of the enigma--for enigma it certainly is." "You agree with me, then, that poor Harry was the victim of foul play?" she asked in a low, intense voice, eagerly watching his face the while. "Yes," he answered very slowly, "and, further, that the woman who visited him that afternoon was an accessory. Harry Bellairs was _murdered_!" Her cheeks blanched and she went pale to the lips. He saw the sudden change in her, and realised what a supreme effort she was making to betray no undue alarm. But the effect of his cold, calm words had been almost electrical. He watched her countenance slowly flushing, but pretended not to notice her confusion. And so he walked on at her side, full of wonderment. How much did she know? Why, indeed, had Harry Bellairs fallen the victim of a secret assassin? No trained officer of the Criminal Investigation Department was more ingenious in making secret inquiries, more clever in his subterfuges or in disguising his real objects, than Walter Fetherston. Possessed of ample means, and member of that secret club called "Our Society," which meets at intervals and is the club of criminologists, and pursuing the detection of crime as a pastime, he had on many occasions placed Scotland Yard and the Surete in Paris in possession of information which had amazed them and which had earned for him the high esteem of those in office as Ministers of the Interior in Paris, Rome and in London. The case of Captain Henry Bellairs he had taken up merely because he recognised in it some unusual circumstances, and without sparing effort he had investigated it rapidly and secretly from every standpoint. He had satisfied himself. Certain knowledge that he had was not possessed by any officer at Scotland Yard, and only by reason of that secret knowledge had he been able to arrive at the definite conclusion that there had been a strong motive for the captain's death, and that if he had been secretly poisoned--which seemed to be the case, in spite of the analysts' evidence--then he had been poisoned by the velvet hand of a woman. Walter Fetherston was ever regretting his inability to put any of the confidential information he acquired into his books. "If I could only write half the truth of what I know, people would declare it to be fiction," he had often assured intimate friends. And those friends had pondered and wondered to what he referred. He wrote of crime, weaving those wonderful romances which he
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