Early the following morning an empty hansom drove up, bearing a little note from Paul. Would twelve o'clock suit her to see him? And would she send an answer by the cab?
She wrote a few lines in affirmative reply; then, after seeing her step-mother comfortably established on the sitting-room sofa where she and Victor had revelled in each other's society that night of happiness after the performance--the night he first showed her his somewhat sudden passion for her in all its fulness--she stole away upstairs to the attic to put away the relics of the dead man.
She had cleared her two best trunks; and in these she meant to store everything he had left--clothes, books, pipes. The money had been placed in a bank in her step-mother's name. A lawyer friend of Doctor Thompson had acted for them, and had simplified everything.
The little room was hot. She opened the window wide, drew down the tattered old green blind, and set to work shaking, folding, and arranging Victor's clothes.
How like him it was to have shirts that a French marquis would hardly have disdained! As she laid them away with as tender and reverent a touch as that of a bereaved mother storing away the little garments of a loved, lost infant, she almost broke down. But she took herself sternly to task, repressed her melting mood, and reminded herself that a strong man's work--the bringing a criminal to book--was hers. Any and every womanish weakness must be sternly disallowed.
One trunk was soon full of linen and odds and ends. This she locked, and proceeded to fill the next. The books came first--mere remnants of volumes, mostly French, with morsels of yellow paper cover adhering to them. But--strongly redolent of tobacco, she put them carefully in a layer beside the cases of pipes, and the odd-looking curios he had collected. They seemed almost part of him, somehow, those pipes. That they should be there, smelling of the weed he had smoked, and he should be mouldering in his grave in that densely populated cemetery! She shuddered. Her hand trembled: she picked up a yellow volume, Quatre Femmes et un Perroquet, with eyes brimming over with tears, picked it up carelessly; something fell out.
Something? Two things--one, a soiled little photograph. As she seized it her tears dried--her eyes burned. It was the photograph of three girls.
Evidently an amateur attempt--badly mounted. Three girls in summer frocks and aprons, two standing, one seated on a bench--in front there was grass--at the back, part of a brick house and some shrubs.
Fiercely, with intense anxiety, she stared at the three faces. Two were round and plain: these belonged to the girls--fifteen or sixteen years of age at the utmost--who were standing. The face of the seated girl was a beautiful one: full of sweet pathos, and yet with a tender happy smile about the mouth.
"Too young to be that awful woman," she mused, crouching on the floor, and gazing. Still, one of them might have been her daughter. The woman, by his account, had been older than Victor, possibly a widow with a child, or children.