Next day I spent in making inquiries with a view to discovering the house said to be occupied by Leithcourt.  As it was not either in the Directory or the Blue Book, I concluded that he had perhaps rented it furnished, and after many inquiries and considerable difficulties I found that such was the fact.  He had occupied the house of Lady Heathcote, a few doors from Grosvenor Square, for the previous season, although he had lived there but very little.

Where the fugitives were in hiding I had no idea.  I longed to meet Muriel again and tell her what I had discovered, yet it was plain that the trio were concealing themselves from Hylton Chater, whom I supposed to be now back in London.

The autumn days were dull and rainy, and the streets were muddy and unpleasant, as they always are at the fall of the year.  Compelled to remain inactive, I idled in the club with the recollection of that pictured face ever before me—­the face of the unfortunate girl who wished her last message to be conveyed to Philip Hornby.  What, I wondered, was her secret?  What was really her fate?

This latter question troubled me until I could bear it no longer.  I felt that it was my duty to go to Finland and endeavor to learn something regarding this Baron Oberg and his niece.  Frank Hutcheson had written me declaring that the weather in Leghorn was now perfect, and expressing wonder that I did not return.  I was his only English friend, and I knew how dull he was when alone.  Even his Majesty’s Consuls sometimes suffer from homesickness, and long for the smell of the London gutters and a glass of homely bitter ale.

But you, my reader, who have lived in a foreign land for any length of time, know well how wearisome becomes the life, however brilliant, and how sweet are the recollections of our dear gray old England with her green fields, her muddy lanes, and the bustling streets of her gray, grimy cities.  You have but one “home,” and England Is still your home, even though you may become the most bigoted of cosmopolitans and may have no opportunity of speaking your native tongue the whole year through.

Duty—­the duty of a man who had learned strange facts and knew that a defenseless woman was a victim—­called me to Finland.  Therefore, with my passport properly vised and my papers all in order, I one night left Hull for Stockholm by the weekly Wilson service.  Four days of rough weather in the North Sea and the Baltic brought me to the Swedish capital, whence on the following day I took the small steamer which plies three times a week around the Aland Islands, and then across the Gulf of Bothnia to Korpo, and through the intricate channels and among those low-lying islands to the gray lethargic town of Abo.

It was not the first occasion on which I had trod Russian soil, and I knew too well the annoyances of the bureaucracy.  Finland, however, is perhaps the most severely governed of any of the Czar’s dominions, and I had my first taste of its stern, relentless officialdom at the moment of landing on the half-deserted quay.