“The last I saw of him he was grinning like the—­”

“Oh, you wretch!” cried the girl, and Dorothy put her fingers to her ears.

“Shut up, Dickey,” exclaimed Quentin.  “Do you care to hear about that woman in Brussels, Dorothy?”

“It is of no great consequence to me, but I’ll listen if you like,” she said, slowly.

Thereupon he related to the party the story of the finding of the dead woman in a house near the Garrison home in the Avenue Louise.  She had been dead for two days and her throat was cut.  The house in which she was found was the one into which Turk had seen Courant disappear on the night of the veranda incident at the Garrison’s.  Turk had been sent to Brussels by Quentin on a mission of considerable importance, arriving there soon after the body was discovered.  He saw the woman’s face at the morgue and recognized her as the one who had approached Quentin in the train for Paris.  Turk learned that the police, to all appearances had found a clew, but had suddenly dropped the whole matter and the woman was classified with the “unknown dead.”  An attendant at the morgue carelessly remarked in his hearing that she was the mistress of a great man, who had sent them word to “throw her in the river.”  Secretly Turk assured himself that there was no mistake as to the house in which she had been found, and by putting two and two together, it was not unnatural to agree with the morgue officer and to supply for his own benefit the name of the royal lover.  The newspapers which Turk brought from Brussels to Castle Craneycrow contained accounts of the murder of the beautiful woman, speculated wildly as to her idenity and termed the transaction a mystery as unsolvable as the great abduction.  The same papers had the report, on good authority, that Miss Garrison had been murdered by her captors in a small town in Spain, the authorities being so hot on the trail that she was put out of the way for safety’s sake.

But the papers did not know that a bearded man named Turk had slipped a sealed envelope under a door at the Garrison home, and that a distressed mother had assurance from the brigand chief that her daughter was alive and well, but where she could not be found.  To prove that the letter was no imposition, it was accompanied by a lock of hair from Dorothy’s head, two or three bits of jewelry and a lace handkerchief that could not have belonged to another.  Dorothy did not know how or when Baker secured these bits of evidence, When Quentin told her the chief object of Turk’s perilous visit to Brussels, her eyes filled with tears, and for the first time she felt grateful to him.

“I have a confession to make,” she said, after the story was finished and the others had deliberately charged Ugo with the crime.  “That poor woman came to me in Brussels and implored me to give up the prince.  She told me, Phil, that she loved him and warned me to beware of him.  And she said that he would kill her if he knew that she had come to me.”