The girl puzzled me strangely.  At times it almost seemed as though she were being forced against her will to take part in some business that she thoroughly disliked; but then the obvious way in which the two men trusted her scarcely bore out this idea.  She showed no particular affection for her father, and it was plain that she detested McMurtrie, yet there was evidently some bond between them strong enough to keep all three together.

To me she behaved from the first with a sort of sullen friendliness.  She would come and sit in my room, and with her chin resting on her hand and her big dark eyes fixed on mine, she would ask me questions about myself or listen to the stories I told her of the prison.  Once, when I had been describing some peculiarly mean little persecution which one of the warders (who objected on principle to what he called “gen’lemen lags”) had amused himself by practising on me, she had jumped up and with a quick, almost savage gesture, laid her hand on my arm.

“Never mind,” she said; “it’s over now, and you shall make them pay for what they have done to you.  We can promise you that at least,” and she laughed with a curious bitterness I failed to understand.

Of the mysterious Mr. Hoffman, who had turned up at the house on the second day after my arrival, I saw or heard nothing more.  I asked Sonia about him one day, but she only replied curtly that he was a business friend of the doctor’s, and with this meagre information I had to remain content.

The point that I felt perhaps most inquisitive about was whom McMurtrie could have mistaken me for when I had crawled in through the kitchen window.  I had a distinct recollection of his having mentioned some name just before I had collapsed, but it had gone out of my head and for the life of me I couldn’t recall it.  You know the maddening way a name will hang about the tip of one’s tongue, just avoiding every effort at recapture.

Apart from my talks with Sonia, my chief entertainment was reading the Daily Mail.  Not a day passed but some one seemed to discover a fresh clue to my hiding-place.  I was seen and recognized at Manchester, Yarmouth, London, and Edinburgh; while one gentleman wrote to inform the editor he had trustworthy information I was actually in St. Petersburg, having been engaged by the Russian Government to effect certain improvements in their torpedo service.  All this was quite pleasing, for, in addition to showing me that the police were still utterly at sea as to my whereabouts, I knew that each fresh report would help to keep George in an acute state of nervous tension.

Just as my imprisonment was becoming almost unbearably irksome, the end arrived with an unexpected abruptness.  I was sitting at the window one morning smoking an after-breakfast pipe—­a pipe which Sonia had brought me back from Plymouth at the same time as the books—­when I heard a loud ring at the front door-bell, followed by a couple of sharp knocks.  Despite my three years’ absence from worldly affairs, I recognized the unmistakable touch of a telegraph-boy.