Upon events which occurred immediately afterwards there is little need
to dwell, save to declare that the hours that followed were the most
joyous of all our lives; and further, that the post and the telegraph
that night carried over the seas a demand to the police for the search
and arrest of Madame Damant and the unscrupulous schemer Henry Blain.
A little more than a year has now gone by since that well-remembered day
of confession, and Eva and I are happily united man and wife, while Lily
Lowry no longer toils at her counter but is married to Dick, against
whom Boyd's suspicions were, of course, entirely unfounded. By the
death of a maiden aunt, who never gave me sixpence while alive, I have
fortunately found myself possessed of sufficient to live independently
in a house embowered in trees on the banks of the Exe, in Devon, while
Dick, who is still "the _Comet_ man," lives in a neat villa out at
Beckenham. Eva and I are frequent guests there, and on such occasions
the conversation often turns to those breathless summer days up the
Thames and that extraordinary mystery so intricate and puzzling--a
mystery which never, after all, appeared in the _Comet_.
Of Mrs. Blain and Mary we hear but very little. They left Riverdene
broken and crushed, poor things, and went to live in a small house at
Bournemouth upon the wreck of the fugitive's fortune. No word has since
been heard of him, but as the deed-box containing many of the papers was
found by the police in a garret in the Rue du Maure in Paris, from which
the occupier--an Englishman answering to Blain's description--had
mysteriously disappeared, it is almost beyond doubt that he had
committed suicide rather than starve. Hartmann's unclaimed scientific
discovery is still the wonder of the Royal Institution, and Patterson is
still stationed at Kensington. As for Madame Damant, she was three
months ago arrested in Venice, where, in the course of a sensational
trial, it was proved that she had most ingeniously poisoned a wealthy
German contractor whom she had inveigled into marriage, and to-day she
is serving a life-term of imprisonment. The Italian Government does not
give up its subjects for offences committed abroad, or she would
otherwise have been brought to London for trial, and the readers of
newspapers would have been startled by the details of this, one of the
most skilful and extraordinary plots of secret assassination ever
devised by the devilish ingenuity of man or woman.
The End.