She poured out the tea and prattled on. As Joan was just languidly uncovering the chicken, hardly giving any attention to the girl's flow of talk--she was speaking of the actress she had seen perform the night Joan first met Victor in the Regent's Park--a certain word half startled her from her reverie--the word "suicide." Then, in her strung-up, nervous state, with that bottle on her mind, she was at once on the alert.
"Who? What suicide?" she sharply asked. "Not the girl you saw act, and liked so much?"
"No, mademoiselle, her brother," returned Julie earnestly. "Poor girl! Such an awful thing! Robert, who always reads the journaux when they arrive--he airs them, you know, mademoiselle--told me, for he knows I admired this Vera Anerley. It seems she had returned from the theatre to find her brother lying on the sofa--quite dead--alone in the house!"
Joan had clenched her hands on the chair as she listened incredulously. What a horrible coincidence, she thought, that Julie should have such a grotesquely parallel tale to tell her--with such a tragic conclusion, when only last night she had seen Victor Mercier lying in that deathly sleep on the sofa, also alone in the house.
"Very dreadful for her, indeed," she slowly said, striving to recover from what was almost a shock in the circumstances, and sipping her tea. "Is the--the--story in one of those papers you have brought me?"
"Yes, mademoiselle! I can find it--Robert read it me--"
"Never mind! I will find it myself, presently," interrupted Joan. Then she sent the eager girl downstairs with a message that "she could not come down that evening; she had had no sleep, and was going to bed immediately"--a mission invented more to get rid of her than anything else.
What was it which made her spring up from the door and lock it, almost as it closed upon Julie? Why did she dart back to the table, seize the paper her maid had taken up and laid aside again at her bidding, and holding it in her trembling hands, scan its pages feverishly with her strained eyes--eyes almost blinded by intense fear?
It was more an awful sense of certainty than mere dread. As she found the paragraph she sought, she fell limply into a chair, and staring madly at the cruel words, told herself it was no surprise. No! She had known something terrible had happened--all through those hours of cruel physical pain--she had known it!
"I knew it, I knew it!" she gasped, as for a third time she read the fatal words, with a mad hope that she was under a delusion.