"I am very cold," Freddy cried piteously, holding out a little blue foot from underneath his night-shirt. "If you don't want to wake Mr. Matravers, will you take me up to bed, please?"
Through a mist of sudden tears, she looked down into her boy's face. She drew a deep, quick breath--her fingers were suddenly nerveless. There was a great dull stain on the front of her dress, the wine-glass, shattered into many pieces, lay at her feet. She fell on her knees, and with a little burst of passionate sobs took him into her arms.
There were grey hairs in the woman's head, although she was still quite young. A few yards ahead, the bath chair, wheeled by an attendant, was disappearing in the shroud of white mist, which had suddenly rolled in from the sea. But the woman lingered for a moment with her eyes fixed upon that dim, distant line, where the twilight fell softly upon the grey ocean. It was the single hour in the long day which she claimed always for her own--for it seemed to her in that mysterious stillness, when the shadows were gathering and the winds had dropped, that she could sometimes hear his voice. Perhaps, somewhere, he too longed for that hour--a dweller, it might be, in that wonderful spirit world of the unknown, of which he had spoken sometimes with a curiously grave solemnity. Her hands clasped the iron railing, a light shone for a moment in the pale-lined face turned so wistfully seawards!
Was it the low, sweet music of the sea, or was it indeed his voice in her ears, languorous and soft, long-travelled yet very clear. Somewhere at least he must know that hers had become at his bidding the real sacrifice! A smile transfigured her face! It was for this she had lived!
Then there came her summons. A querulous little cry reached her from the bath chair, drawn up on the promenade. She waved her hand cheerfully.
But her face was turned towards that dim, grey line of silvery light, and the wind caught hold of her words and carried them away over the bosom of the sea--upwards!
A straightforward mystery story, the plot of which hinges on the sale of two battleships.
The tale of a world-startling international intrigue.
Mr. Oppenheim is a past master of the art of constructing ingenious plots and weaving them around attractive characters.--_London Morning Mail_