“Fanny, you don’t think that I—”
Drama, real drama, is an enjoyable rarity. Orr longed to stay and see it out. But, obviously, anything of the kind would have been worse than indiscreet. He picked up his hat.
“Fanny,” Annandale repeated, “you can’t think—”
“Oh,” she interrupted, “you see you made it quite unnecessary for me to think at all. You told me beforehand. Wasn’t it considerate?” she added, turning to Orr.
“But I did not mean it,” cried Annandale. “As God is my witness—”
“I am a witness,” Fanny interjected, interrupting him again. But the interruption was effected without abruptness, without apparent emotion, sweetly, almost lispingly, with a modulation of the voice that was restful to the ear. “And,” she added, in the same sugary, leisurely way, but raising now a slender finger gloved in white, “I will swear to what you said.”
At this Orr swam, or tried to swim, to the rescue. “Surely,” he protested, “you would not do that?”
“Wouldn’t I?” she answered, addressing Orr and speaking in the same smiling, seductive fashion that she had to Annandale. “Wouldn’t I, indeed! Really, believe me, you are quite in error.”
Annandale fell back in the chair from which he had arisen. “Fanny,” he gasped, “I did not know a woman could hate like that.”
Fanny smiled afresh. “No? Is it possible? But, then, perhaps, you never knew how a woman could love.”
She gave a little nod. It was as though she were adding, “Take that.”
Orr was buttoning a glove, preparing to retreat. She turned to him: “Don’t go. Stay and have a drink with Arthur. He looks as though he needed one.”
She moved back.
“Yes, stay,” she continued. “I am going.” Once more the slender finger gloved in white was raised. “Arthur Annandale, never willingly will I see you again—except in court. For to court I shall go, if only to see you sentenced.”
At that, at the splendid ferocity of it, Orr looked at Annandale. When he turned to look at Fanny, silently, no doubt smilingly, she had gone.
VI
What the Papers Said
There are occasions when speech is an intrusion and sympathy an affront. An occasion of this kind coincided with Fanny’s exit. On the mantel the clock still ticked. Otherwise there was silence in that room.
Orr, finishing with his glove, made for the door. “If I can be of use,” he said, “let me know.”
Annandale stood up. “You can,” he answered. For a moment he hesitated. He seemed lost and dizzy. Then, with an effort, he got himself together. “Tell Sylvia it is not true.”
Orr passed out. But instead of returning at once to Irving Place he went up the steps of an adjoining house. There he was told that Mrs. Loftus could see no one. He had not expected to be received. But he felt for her, felt, too, how she must feel.
That a Loftus should die would, he knew, be enough. But that a Loftus should be murdered, and that Loftus be her son, there was something which, Orr thought, might perhaps overwhelm her. And, as Orr afterward learned, Mrs. Loftus was then sitting, her attendants about her, absently and ceaselessly shaking her head. Nor did the motion of it ever cease. She was palsied.
Before Orr learned of that other things supervened, primarily fresh extras. These of course were indicated. The imagination of the public had been stirred. Of all things mystery affects the imagination most. Here was one agreeably heightened by subsequent editions announcing the projection of the eternal feminine.
Then those that read these sheets felt that they were getting their money’s worth. But the feeling was accentuated when one of the papers gratified them with a picture of a girl who they saw was an exceedingly fetching young woman and who they were informed had vanished from her residence, the Arundel, where she was known as Miss Leroy.
Her connection with Loftus, a connection which the neighborhood generally understood, was shown with reportorial ease. With the same ease it was established that he had been with her the evening preceding the night of his death. Bag and baggage the next morning she had flown.
That fact in itself was prodigiously interesting. A young and pretty assassin, what! It was quite like fiction. It was almost too good or too bad to be true. Besides, the picture displayed a girl not merely pretty but quasi-ideal, a face infinitely delicate, disdainful yet sad.
Orr saw the picture and saw too that, while perhaps rather flattering, it did not resemble Marie in the least. As a matter of fact it was an art editor’s fake. But that, of course, the public did not know and being fed on fakes would not have cared if it had known.
Then more mystery followed. What were her antecedents? Who were her people? Whence had she come? No one could say. What alone could be said was that a year previous Loftus had taken for her an apartment at the Arundel, where she had resided in a manner otherwise genteel, though with, latterly, but one servant, a negress named Blanche.
At the time the police were as much interested in the servant as the public in the girl. The latter in departing had had the forethought to leave the former behind, and, from her, information relevant and irrelevant was obtained.
To Mr. Peacock for instance, one of the district attorneys, Blanche related that at dinner her mistress liked sweetbreads and sorrel with, now and then, a chocolate souffle.
Mr. Peacock was a florid man with the face of a cupid, the guile of a fox and the voice of an ogre. “I don’t care for that,” he told her.
“Nor I,” Blanche agreeably replied.
“I mean,” said Mr. Peacock, “that I don’t care about her victuals. She was in love with the dead man, wasn’t she?”
“I guess so,” Blanche with profound if unconscious psychology replied. “She was always scrapping with him. She—”
“Tell me,” Peacock interrupted, “what happened the last
