His daughter heard these words with a sinking heart. She had a most
unhappy picture of herself boarding a ship and sailing out of Liverpool
or Southampton, leaving the mystery that so engrossed her thoughts
forever unsolved. Wisely she diverted her father's thoughts toward
the question of food. She had heard, she said, that Simpson's, in the
Strand, was an excellent place to dine. They would go there, and walk.
She suggested a short detour that would carry them through Adelphi
Terrace. It seemed she had always wanted to see Adelphi Terrace.
As they passed through that silent Street she sought to guess, from an
inspection of the grim forbidding house fronts, back of which lay the
lovely garden, the romantic mystery. But the houses were so very much
like one another. Before one of them, she noted, a taxi waited.
After dinner her father pleaded for a music-hall as against what he
called "some highfaluting, teacup English play." He won. Late that
night, as they rode back to the Carlton, special editions were being
proclaimed in the streets. Germany was mobilizing!
The girl from Texas retired, wondering what epistolary surprise the
morning would bring forth. It brought forth this: DEAR DAUGHTER OF THE SENATE: Or is it Congress? I could not quite
decide. But surely in one or the other of those August bodies your
father sits when he is not at home in Texas or viewing Europe through
his daughter's eyes. One look at him and I had gathered that.
But Washington is far from London, isn't it? And it is London that
interests us most--though father's constituents must not know that. It
is really a wonderful, an astounding city, once you have got the feel of
the tourist out of your soul. I have been reading the most enthralling
essays on it, written by a newspaper man who first fell desperately
in love with it at seven--an age when the whole glittering town was
symbolized for him by the fried-fish shop at the corner of the High
Street. With him I have been going through its gray and furtive
thoroughfares in the dead of night, and sometimes we have kicked an
ash-barrel and sometimes a romance. Some day I might show that London
to you--guarding you, of course, from the ash-barrels, if you are that
kind. On second thoughts, you aren't. But I know that it is of Adelphi
Terrace and a late captain in the Indian Army that you want to hear now.
Yesterday, after my discovery of those messages in the Mail and the call
of Captain Hughes, passed without incident. Last night I mailed you my
third letter, and after wandering for a time amid the alternate glare
and gloom of the city, I went back to my rooms and smoked on my balcony
while about me the inmates of six million homes sweltered in the heat.
Nothing happened. I felt a bit disappointed, a bit cheated, as one might
feel on the first night spent at home after many successive visits to
exciting plays. To-day, the first of August dawned, and still all was
quiet. Indeed, it was not until this evening that further developments
in the sudden death of Captain Fraser-Freer arrived to disturb me. These
developments are strange ones surely, and I shall hasten to relate them.