In fact, the business changed hands a year ago, and none of the previous employees have remained." "Ah! that's unfortunate," I said, greatly disappointed; and having copied the address to which the negative and prints had been sent, I thanked her and left.
Who, I wondered, was this Baron Oberg, and what relation was he to Elma Heath?
The picture of the girl in the white blouse somehow exercised a strange attraction for me.
Have you never experienced the fascination of a photograph, inexplicable and yet forcible--a kind of magnetism from which you cannot release yourself?
Perhaps it was the curious fact that some person had taken it from its frame on board the _Lola_ and destroyed it that first aroused my interest; or it might have been the discovery of it in Muriel's room at Rannoch.

Anyhow, it had for me an absorbing interest, for I often wondered whether the unknown girl who had secretly gone ashore from the yacht when I had left it was not Elma Heath herself.
Who was this Baron Oberg?
The name was German undoubtedly, yet he lived in the Russian capital.

From London to Petersburg is a far cry, yet I resolved that if it were necessary I would travel there and investigate.
At the German Embassy, in Carlton House Terrace, I found my friend Captain Nieberding, the second secretary, of whom I inquired whether the name of Baron Oberg was known, but having referred to a number of German books in his Excellency's library, he returned and told me that the name did not appear in the lists of the German nobility.
"He may be Russian--Polish most probably," added the captain, a tall, fair fellow in gold spectacles, whom I had known when he was third secretary of Embassy at Rome.

His opinion was that it was not a German name, for there was a little place called Oberg, he said, on the railway between Lodz and Lowicz.
Then, after luncheon, I went to Albany Road, one of those dreary, old-fashioned streets that were pleasant back in the early Victorian days when Camberwell was a suburb and Walworth Common was still an open waste.

I found the house where Olinto lived--a small, smoke-blackened, semi-detached place standing back in a tiny strip of weedy garden, with a wooden veranda before the first floor windows.