The Ashiel Mystery

"While I was waiting, I suddenly heard footsteps which appeared to come from inside the wall of the room, or from below the floor. I concluded instantly that there was a secret passage within the walls although I had failed to find the entrance, so I left the library quickly and quietly, and made my way to the garden, from which I was able to look back into the room through the window. By the time I took up my post of observation the person I had heard approaching had entered. To my surprise it was a young lady about whom I seemed to recognize something vaguely familiar, but whom I was not aware of ever having seen before. She was occupied in examining the papers in Lord Ashiel's writing bureau, and after watching her for some time, I concluded that she must be Julia Romaninov; partly from certain foreign ways and gestures which she displayed, and partly from her present employment, as I knew of no one else who was interested in the papers of the dead man. I imagined that she knew of the possible relationship which Lord Ashiel supposed might exist between himself and her, and that she was searching for evidence of her birth. Whether she was staying at the castle, which I was told all visitors had left, or whether, like myself, she had made her way into it from outside, was a question I could not then determine, though the next day I discovered that she was stopping with Mrs. Clutsam at the fishing lodge, near by.

"The fact of her being still in the neighbourhood, the business I found her engaged upon--an unusual one, to put it mildly, for a young girl--and the hour, at which she had chosen to go about it, all gave me much food for thought, and I felt sure she could tell me news of the stranger who had landed in the bay and who wore such uncommonly pointed boots. When I recognized in her, on the following day, a young person who had, a few weeks previously, made me the victim of a barefaced and audacious robbery, I could no longer doubt that she and the unknown boatman were in league together; and, since no Englishman would be likely to wear boots so excessively pointed at the toes, I did not hesitate to conclude that they were both members of the Society of the Friends of Man, a conclusion which became a certainty when I subsequently saw them together. This discovery rather shook my belief in the guilt of young Ashiel, although I had an inward conviction that in spite of everything he would turn out to be the murderer. Still, I was after the Nihilist brotherhood as well, and I determined if possible to put a spoke in the wheel of that association when I had finished with the first and most important business.