She almost fled along, across the road, into the cathedral, as a guilty, hunted creature seeking sanctuary. She halted when she had closed the door. There was a calm, a rest, in the sacred fane which was as the presence of the Creator Himself. She slunk into a corner, and crouching down, clung for support to the rail of the bench in front of her and waited.
Waited, half-dazed and stupified, hardly knowing where she was, mind and brain confused as if too paralysed to think, to act. Hour after hour passed. Afternoon service proceeded in the choir. Almost grovelling in her corner, she listened. She could not pray--she was past that.
Then, as there was a movement of the congregation to the doors, she forced herself to rise and pass out among them. For she knew the evening papers would be out.
She hurried from the Abbey into the street, bought one from the first urchin she met shouting "Special Edeetion!" fled across one street and along another, into the Park. There she found an empty bench, and, well hidden from passers-by by a clump of shrubs, opened her paper with trembling fingers. Yes! There it was!
"INQUEST THIS DAY. STRANGE REVELATIONS."
CHAPTER XXIII
The paragraphs seemed to dance before her eyes. Joan's mind at first refused to understand. Then, as she read, she feared her brain was playing her false.
Victor a'Court was identified by several witnesses--one a detective, who had failed to track him when he was "wanted" four years ago for embezzling monies belonging to his firm--as Victor Mercier.
His old mother was called, but was in so pitiable a state that his identity was finally established by the evidence of her step-daughter, Vera "Anerley."
She was described as pale, but perfectly self-possessed. She told the coroner's court how Victor Mercier's father died in obscurity some years before her own father, a widower, met Madame Mercier and married her. She and Victor, who was ten years at least her senior, had called each other brother and sister, albeit not related. She knew nothing of the particulars of the charge brought against him some years ago, except that the firm were subsequently bankrupt. She knew he had "got on" abroad, but how, or why, he had not exactly said.