on, bears me away from the morning-time of our
married life, and carries me forward to the End.

In a fortnight more we three were back in
London; and the shadow was stealing over us
of the struggle to come.

Marian and I were careful to keep Laura in
ignorance of the cause that had hurried us back
—the necessity of making sure of the Count.
It was now the beginning of May, and his term
of occupation at the house in Forest-road
expired in June. If he renewed it (and I had
reasons, shortly to be mentioned, for anticipating
that he would), I might be certain of his not
escaping me. But, if by any chance he
disappointed my expectations, and left the country—
then, I had no time to lose in arming myself to
meet him as I best might.

In the first fulness of my new happiness,
there had been moments when my resolution
faltered—moments, when I was tempted to be
safely content, now that the dearest aspiration
of my life was fulfilled in the possession
of Laura's love. For the first time, I
thought faint-heartedly of the greatness of
the risk; of the adverse chances arrayed against
me; of the fair promise of our new lives, and
of the peril in which I might place the happiness
which we had so hardly earned. Yes! let
me own it honestly. For a brief time, I
wandered, in the sweet guiding of love, far from the
purpose to which I had been true, under sterner
discipline and in darker days. Innocently,
Laura had tempted me aside from the hard path
—innocently, she was destined to lead me back
again. At times, dreams of the terrible past
still disconnectedly recalled to her, in the
mystery of sleep, the events of which her waking
memory had lost all trace. One night (barely
two weeks after our marriage), when I was
watching her at rest, I saw the tears come
slowly through her closed eyelids, I heard the
faint murmuring words escape her which told
me that her spirit was back again on the fatal
journey from Blackwater Park. That
unconscious appeal, so touching and so awful in the
sacredness of her sleep, ran through me like
fire. The next day was the day we came back
to London—the day when my resolution
returned to me with tenfold strength.

The first necessity was to know something of
the man. Thus far, the true story of his life
was an impenetrable mystery to me.

I began with such scanty sources of information
as were at my own disposal. The important
narrative written by Mr. Frederick Fairlie (which
Marian had obtained by following the directions
I had given to her in the winter) proved to be
of no service to the special object with which I
now looked at it. While reading it, I
reconsidered the disclosure revealed to me by Mrs.
Clements, of the series of deceptions which had
brought Anne Catherick to London, and which
had there devoted her to the interests of the
conspiracy. Here, again, the Count had not
openly committed himself; here again, he was,
to all practical purpose, out of my reach.

I next returned to Marian's journal at Blackwater
Park. At my request she read to me
again a passage which referred to her past
curiosity about the Count, and to the few
particulars which she had discovered relating to
him.

The passage to which I allude occurs in that
part of her journal which, delineates his
character and his personal appearance. She
describes him as "not having crossed the frontiers
of his native country for years past"—as
"anxious to know if any Italian gentlemen
were settled in the nearest town to Blackwater
Park"—as "receiving letters with all sorts of
odd stamps on them, and one with a large,
official-looking seal on it." She is inclined to
consider that his long absence from his native
country may be accounted for by assuming that
he is a political exile. But she is, on the other
hand, unable to reconcile this idea with his
reception of the letter from abroad, bearing " the
large official-looking seal"—letters from the
Continent addressed to political exiles being
usually the last to court attention from foreign
post-offices in that way.

The considerations thus presented to me in
the diary, joined to certain surmises of my own
that grew out of them, suggested a conclusion
which I wondered I had not arrived at before.
I now said to myself—what Laura had once said
to Marian at Blackwater Park; what Madame
Fosco had overheard by listening at the door—
the Count is a Spy!

Laura had applied the word to him at hazard,
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
thousands, 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