"You have heard it all then?"
"No, no!" she said hurriedly.
The room was swaying round her: the furniture started hopping and dancing. Louisa, who had never fainted in her life, felt as if the floor was giving way under her feet. Memory was unloading one of her storehouses, looking over the contents of a hidden cell, wherein she had put away a strange winter scene in Brussels, a taxicab, the ill-lighted boulevard, the chauffeur getting down from his box and finding a man crouched in the farther corner of the cab—dead—with his throat pierced from ear to ear by an instrument which might have been a skewer. And memory was raking out that cell, clearing it in every corner, trying to find the recollection of a certain morning in Battersea Park a year ago, when Louisa recounted her impressions of that weird scene and told the tale of this crime which she had almost witnessed. Memory found a distinct impression that she had told the tale at full length and with all the details which she knew. She remembered talking it all over, and, that when she did so, the ground in Battersea Park was crisp with the frost under her feet, and an inquisitive robin perched himself on the railings and then flew away accompanying her and another all the way along as far as the gates.
Two pictures, vivid and distinct: that evening in Brussels, and the morning in Battersea Park, her first meeting with Luke after his letter to her—the letter which had come to her in the Palace Hotel and which had made her the happiest woman in all the world. Memory—satisfied—had at last emptied the storehouse of that one cell and left Louisa Harris standing here, staring at her father, her ears buzzing with the idle and irresponsible chatter of society jackdaws, her mind seeing all that had happened outside 1 Cromwell Road: the cab stopping, the chauffeur terrified, the crowd collecting, the police taking notes. Her mind saw it as if her bodily eyes had been there, and all that her father told her seemed but the recapitulation of what she knew already.
"Where," she said after awhile, "is the dead man now?"
"I don't know," he replied. "I should imagine they would keep the body at the police station until the morning. I don't suppose they'd be such mugs as to disturb Lord Radclyffe at this time of night; the shock might kill the old man."
"I suppose they are quite sure that it is Philip de Mountford who was killed?"
"Why, yes; he had his pocket-book, his cards, his letters on him, and money too—robbery was not the object of the crime."
"It was Philip de Mountford then?"
"Good God, yes! Of whom were you thinking?"