The Secret of Lonesome Cove Part 7

"She walked away from me a few paces, but turned and came back at once.

"'I follow my star,' she said, pointing to a planet that shone low over the sea. 'Therein lies the only true happiness; to dare and to follow.'

"'It's a practise which has got many people into trouble and some into jail,' I remarked.

"'Do not be flippant,' she replied in her deep tones. 'Perhaps under that star you move on dim paths to an unknown glory.'

"'See here,' I broke out, 'you're making me uncomfortable. If you've got something to tell, please tell it, kindly omitting the melodrama.'

"'Remember this meeting,' she said in a tone of solemn command; 'for it may mark an epoch in your life. Some day in the future I may send for you and recall to-day to your mind by what I have just said. In that day you will know the hidden things that are clear only to the chosen minds.

Perhaps you will be the last person but one to see me as I now am.'"

Kent pulled nervously at the lobe of his ear. "Is it possible that she foresaw her death?" he murmured.

"It would look so, in the light of what has happened, wouldn't it? Yet there was an uncanny air of joyousness about her, too."

"I don't like it," announced Kent. "I _do_ not like it!"

By which he meant that he did not understand it. What Chester Kent does not understand, Chester Kent resents.

"Love-affair, perhaps," suggested the artist. "A woman in love will take any risk of death. However," he added, rubbing his bruised head reminiscently, "she had a very practical bent, for a romantic person.

After her mysterious prophecy she started on. I called to her to come back or I would follow and make her explain herself."

"As to what?"

"Everything: her being there, her actions, her-her apparel, the jewelry, you know, and all that."

"You've said nothing about jewelry."

"Haven't I? Well, when she turned-"

"Just a moment. Was it the jewelry that you were going to speak of when you first accosted her?"

"Yes, it was. Some of it was very valuable, I judge. Wasn't it found on the body?"

"No."

"Not? Robbery, then, probably. Well, she came back at a stride. Her eyes were alive with anger. There came a torrent of words from her; strong words, too. Nothing of the well-bred woman left there. I insisted on knowing who she was, and she burst out on me with laughter that was, somehow, more insulting than her speech. But when I told her that I'd find out about her if I had to follow her into the sea, she stopped laughing fast enough. Before I could guard myself she had caught up a rock from the road and let me have it. I went over like a tenpin. When I got up, she was well along toward the cliffs, and I never did find her trail in that maze of copses and thickets."

"Show me your relative positions when she attacked you."

The artist placed Kent, and moved off five paces. "About like that," he said.

"Did she throw overhand or underhand?"

"It was so quick I hardly know. But I should say a short overhand snap.

It came hard enough!"

"I do not like it at all," said Kent again.

He wandered disconsolately and with half-closed eyes about the room, until he blundered into collision with a cot-lounge in the corner, spread with cus.h.i.+ons. These he heaped up, threw his coat over them, stretched himself out with his feet propped high on the mound just erected, and closed his eyes.

"Sleepy?" inquired Sedgwick.

"Busy," retorted his guest.

"Like some more pillows?"

"No; I'd like ten minutes of silence." The speaker opened one eye. "At the end of that time perhaps you'll think better of it."

"Of what?"

"Of concealing an essentially important part of your experience, which has to do, I think, with the jewelry."

At the end of the ten minutes, when Kent opened both eyes, his friend forestalled him with another query.

"You say that no jewels were found on the body. Was there any other mark of identification?"

"If there was, the sheriff got away with it before I saw it."

"How can you be sure, then, that the dead woman was my visitor?"

"Dennett mentioned a necklace. On the crushed flesh of the dead woman's neck there is the plain impress of a jewel setting. Now, come, Sedgwick!

If I'm to help you in this, you must help me. Had you ever seen that necklace before?"

"Yes," was the reply, given with obvious reluctance.

"Where?"

"On the neck of the girl of my picture."

Kent's fingers went to his ear, pulling at the lobe until that unoffending pendant stretched like rubber. "You're sure?" he asked.

"There couldn't be any mistake. The stones were matched rose-topazes; you mightn't find another like it in the whole country."

Kent whistled, soft and long. "I'm afraid, my boy," he said at length, "I'm very much afraid that you'll have to tell me the whole story of the romance of the pictured face; and this time without reservation."

"That's what I've been guarding against," retorted the other. "It isn't a thing that I can tell, man to man. Don't you understand? Or," he added savagely, "do you misunderstand?"

"No, I don't misunderstand," answered Kent very gently. "I know there are things that can't be spoken, not because they are shameful, but because they are sacred. Yet I've got to know about her. Here! I have it. When I'm gone, sit down and write it out for me, simply and fully, and send it to my hotel as soon as it is done. You can do that, can't you?"

"Yes, I can do that," decided Sedgwick, after some consideration.

"Good! Then give me some dinner. And let's forget this grisly thing for a time, and talk of the old days. Whatever became of Harkness, of our cla.s.s, do you know?"

Between them that evening was no further mention of the strange body in Lonesome Cove.