The Lady in Blue by Fred M. White

But Kelso was hardly listening. In his mind's eye he could see Audrey's piteous, pleading face and the look of dumb misery in her blue eyes. It came to him as a kind of shock to discover that this girl meant more to him than the average woman appealing to an honest man's protection. He knew nothing about her. She appeared to have been an absolute mystery to everybody, and he had not spent more than three hours in her company, all told. Why, then, should he be so miserably anxious about her? What was there about her that appealed to him as none of her sex had ever appealed to him before? He was asking himself these questions as the taxicab sped along in the direction of Denver's rooms, and Kelso was not the kind of man to shirk these problems. By the time that the cab stopped, he knew that Audrey Blair was the one woman in the world, so far as he was concerned. True, he knew nothing of her history, true she had mixed herself up in what promised to be a terrible scandal, but all the same he did not doubt her for a moment. A woman with a face as good and true as hers could do no wrong. So he could not bring himself to believe that Audrey had vanished in this bewildering fashion from a fear to face the consequences of her folly. Beyond doubt, she had been spirited away in some fashion, and, probably, the Grand Duke was at the bottom of the mystery.

He cursed himself for his own helplessness and lack of initiative. But, then, there was nothing to go upon; indeed, here he was striving to solve a mystery surrounding a girl whose very home was apparently known to nobody. Possibly relatives might come forward to-morrow; but Kelso was disposed to doubt it. Again, she might be without a single relation in the world--a thing that was highly probable. There was only the woman in the ivory mask, but she was both deaf and dumb, so far as Kelso knew to the contrary.