Early the next morning I sent a line to Mr. Randall effectually relieving him from all the doubts I had left in his mind as to Mr. Sutton’s integrity and genuine change of character. This duty done I thought the story ended, as far as outsiders were concerned. But it was not so. Scarcely three days had elapsed when New York society was startled and her business men confounded by the announcement that Mr. Winchester had disappeared from town, leaving debts of an enormous nature behind him and no assets wherewith to pay those debts. Then and not till then did I understand his passionate anxiety about the diamonds. To a man on the verge of ruin twenty-five thousand dollars may hold out the promise of salvation. At all events it is a convenient sum with which to facilitate flight, and its loss must have been a heavy blow to him.
His wife, whose pride was perhaps phenomenal in its way, never recovered from the shock thus given her. When the last load was driven away from the house she was obliged to abandon, her indomitable spirit broke, and it was a depressed and humiliated woman that at last consented to take up her abode with the son she had cast off and the woman she once looked upon with contempt.
ONE HOUR MORE.
I was walking along the Rue des Martins. I was thoughtful, for I had just been witness to a sight that greatly moved me. My duties as a reporter for one of the large Paris dailies had taken me to Havre just as the ship came in which brought the Communists home from exile, and, hardened as I confess myself to be to the more frequent aspects of human suffering, the sight of those men crowding forward to catch the first glimpse of the friends who had come to meet them, touched me with a feeling that was not unlike compassion. I was thinking of them and wondering what sort of fate awaited the older men I saw there, when a sudden cry from over my head startled me from my musings, and looking up, I saw a woman peering out of the top window of a wretched apartment.
She showed such signs of distress in her countenance that I at once knew something terrible had occurred within, and foreseeing matter for my next article, I immediately entered the house.
I found myself confronted by frightened faces everywhere. All the inmates knew that something was wrong on the top floor, but no one knew just what. They followed me when they saw me determined to find out. The consequence was that a small crowd pressed behind me as I mounted the last stair; a crowd that seemed to awe if not alarm the trembling woman who awaited me at the top, for she started back as she saw it, muttering to herself:
“Mon Dieu! Elise never had so many visitors before!”