The Golden Face Part 34

I got into the car and drove out of the garage again, not knowing how to act. In Oxford Street, at that hour silent and deserted, I drew up, and, taking a piece of paper from my notebook, I wrote down the figures "99," and, placing it in a small envelope which I fortunately found in my wallet, I addressed it to Madame Duperre, and left it with the night porter at the Carlton, urging him to give it to her immediately on her return.

Then I drove to the Strand telegraph office, and thence dispatched a well-guarded message to Lola at Scarborough, telling her to meet me without fail at the Station Hotel at Hull that afternoon and bring her pa.s.sport with her.

This she did, and when we met I told her of her father's unwelcome visitor, the man Gori, and that he feared the police. Both of us decided to pose as runaway lovers and leave the country, which we did, I having succeeded in obtaining two berths upon a Wilson steamer crossing to Bergen.

It was not until a week later that we read in the English newspapers the sensation caused by the arrest of Mr. Rudolph Rayne of Overstow Hall, Yorks.h.i.+re, upon an extradition warrant applied for by the Danish Government. The prisoner had been brought up at Bow Street, and, after certain mysterious evidence had been given, he had been remanded.

In due course Rayne was conveyed to Copenhagen, where he was tried for complicity in a great bank fraud on the Danish National Bank, and sent to twenty years' penal servitude. Hence to the British public Rayne's actual activities were never revealed.

I can only suppose that my warning to Madame had its effect, and that she, her husband and all her friends took flight.

Whether they obtained the money they sought as ransom for old Sir Joseph Bethmeyer I know not. Probably they did, for nothing appeared in the papers concerning his disappearance.

Eventually I succeeded in getting Lola safely to her aunt in Paris, where, though her father's downfall is still a great blow to her, she is living in peace under another name, while I have found honest employment in the office of a French s.h.i.+pping company in Bordeaux.

Lola is my fiancee, and we are to be married next June. One subject, however, we have mutually agreed never to mention, namely, the evil machinations and ingenious activities of her father, the man who had, for some mysterious reason of his own, ascertained that I could sing, and who, in overconfidence at his own cunning, was at last unmasked--"The Golden Face."