"But he will not dare to put foot in London, I suppose. He would be liable to extradition to France."
"Who knows? He is one of the most fearless and ingenious men I have ever known. He can so alter his appearance as to deceive even me."
"But the metropolitan police, knowing that Sylvia--I mean Sonia--is his daughter, may be watching my house!" I exclaimed in alarm.
"That is more than likely," he admitted. "Hence, if you want to allow madame, your wife, an opportunity to approach you, you should go abroad somewhere--to some quiet place where you would not be suspected. Let me know where you go, and perhaps I can manage to convey to them the fact that you are waiting there."
The hotel at Gardone--that fine lake-side hotel where I had first seen Sonia--occurred to me. And I told him.
"Very well," he said cheerfully. "I shall return to Paris to-morrow, and if I can obtain any information from either of the prisoners, I will manage to let Poland know that his son-in-law awaits him."
Then I thanked the great detective, and, shaking hands warmly, we parted.
What Guertin had told me regarding the strange discovery of a man who closely resembled him outside Poland's house on the night of the latter's arrest held me much puzzled. Even he, the all-powerful chief of the _sûreté_, had failed to solve the enigma.
Next afternoon Shuttleworth called upon me in Wilton Street, and for a long time sat chatting.
At last he looked at me gravely, and said--
"I dare say you have been much puzzled, Mr. Biddulph, to know why I, a clergyman of the Church of England, have apparently been mixed up with persons of shady character. But now that four of them are under arrest, and a fifth, we hope, will shortly be apprehended, I will explain. As you perhaps know, Sonia was the daughter of the Honourable Philip Poland, who came to live at the Elms, which is close to the rectory at Middleton. We became great friends, until one evening he made a strange confession to me. He told me who he was--Louis Lessar, who had been the leader of a dangerous band of international thieves--and he asked my advice in my capacity of spiritual guide. He had repented, and had gone into retirement there, believing that his sins would not find him out. But they had done, and he knew he must shortly be arrested. Well, I advised him to act the man, and put aside the thoughts of suicide. What he had revealed to me had--I regret to confess it--aroused my hatred against the man who had betrayed him--a man named Du Cane. This man Du Cane I had only met once, at the Elms, and then I did not realize the amazing truth--that this was the selfsame man who had stolen from me, twenty years before, the woman I had so dearly loved. He had betrayed her, and left her to starve and die in a back street in Marseilles. I concealed my outburst of feeling, yet the very next evening Poland was arrested, and Sonia, ignorant of the truth, was, with a motive already explained by Monsieur Guertin, taken under the guardianship of this man whom I had such just cause to hate--the man who subsequently passed as her father, Pennington. It was because of that I felt all along such a tender interest in the unhappy young lady, and I was so delighted to know when she had at last become your wife."