A professional model Natalie was, but only for the draped figure. She was but eighteen, had been well brought up and educated, but, obliged to earn her own living, had found she had no resources of work except in her God-given beauty. Posing was a joy to her, and she had posed for but a few artists and those of the better, even best class. But Eric, accustomed to having whatever he desired, was determined Natalie should pose for some allegorical figures in a great picture on which he was engaged. This she refused to do, and the more Stannard insisted the more obdurate she became, until there was continual war between them on the subject. And owing to this state of things, Natalie had decided she must leave “Faulkner’s Folly,” and it was only Barry’s entreaties that had thus far kept her from fulfilling her intentions.
Joyce, herself a beautiful woman, of the dark-haired, brown-eyed type, had often been a model for Eric’s pictures, and if she resented being superceded by this peaches and cream maiden, she never confided the fact to those about her. Joyce Stannard was clever by nature, and she knew the quickest way to make her impressionable husband fall desperately in love with Natalie, was for her, his wife, to be openly jealous. So this Joyce would not appear to be. She chaffed him gaily about his doll-faced model and treated Natalie with the patronising generosity one would show to a pretty child.
But if Joyce was clever, Natalie was too, and she took this treatment exactly as it was offered, and returned it in kind. Her manner to her hostess was entirely correct, well-bred and even indicative of gratitude; but it also implied, with subtle touch, the older and more settled state of Joyce, and gave a hint of contrast in the freshness of Natalie’s extreme youth and the permissibility of a spice of the madcap in her ways.
But all these things, on both sides, were so veiled, so delicately suggested, that they were imperceptible to any but the closest observer.
And now, whatever the facts of Eric Stannard’s death might be shown to be, now it must soon be made known that when the lights of the room where he died were turned on, they had revealed these two—his wife and his paid model—near his stricken body, already quivering with its last few heartbeats.
In answer to Barry’s question, Joyce lifted her white face. “I don’t know—” she said, slowly, “I suppose—as Dr. Keith says—these things must be—be attended to in—in the usual way. But I, too, shrink from the awful publicity and the harrowing experience we must go through,—Beatrice, what do you think?”
Mrs. Faulkner replied, with a gentle sympathy: “I fear it won’t matter what we think, Joyce, dear. The law will step in, as always, in case of a crime, and our opinions or wishes will count for nothing.”
“I have sent for the Coroner and for the Police,” said Dr. Keith, who had given Halpin many whispered orders. “Now, Barry, don’t be unreasonable. You can no more stop the routine of the law’s procedure than the stars in their courses. If you know any facts you must be prepared to state them truthfully. If not, you must say or do nothing that will put any obstacle in the way of proper inquiry.”
Dr. Keith was treating Barry like a child, and though the boy resented it, he said nothing, but his face showed his hurt pride and his disappointment.
“Tell us all you can of the facts of the attack,” said Beatrice Faulkner to the doctor.