“Will you excuse me? I feel tired. Good night.”
The clock under the orchestra showed seventeen minutes to ten.
“Instantly?” Cecil queried.
“Instantly.” And the girl added, with a hint of mischief in her voice, as she shook hands: “I look on you as quite a friend since our last little talk; so you will excuse this abruptness, won’t you?”
He was about to answer when a sort of commotion arose near behind them. Still holding her hand he turned to look.
“Why!” he said. “It’s your mother! She must be unwell!”
Mrs. Rainshore, stout, and robed, as always, in tight, sumptuous black, sat among a little bevy of chaperons. She held a newspaper in trembling hands, and she was uttering a succession of staccato “Oh-oh’s,” while everyone in the vicinity gazed at her with alarm. Then she dropped the paper, and, murmuring, “Simeon’s dead!” sank gently to the polished floor just as Cecil and Geraldine approached.
Geraldine’s first instinctive move was to seize the newspaper, which was that day’s Paris edition of the New York Herald. She read the headlines in a flash: “Strange disappearance of Simeon Rainshore. Suicide feared. Takes advantage of his family’s absence. Heavy drop in Dry Goods. Shares at 72 and still falling.”
VI.
“My good Rebecca, I assure you that I am alive.”