“We’ll arrange it somehow,” said the Beaubien, looking up from her papers when Carmen entered. “Go, dearie, and play the organ while I finish this. Then I will return home with you to have a talk with Mrs. Hawley-Crowles.”
For hours the happy girl lingered at the beloved organ. The Beaubien at her desk below stopped often to listen. And often she would hastily brush away the tears, and plunge again into her papers. “I suppose I should have told Mrs. Hawley-Crowles,” she said. “But I couldn’t give her any hope. And even now it’s very uncertain. Ames will yield! I’ll force him to! He knows I can expose him! And yet,” she reflected sadly, “who would believe me?” The morning papers lay still unread upon her table.
Late in the afternoon the Beaubien with Carmen entered her car and directed the chauffeur to drive to the Hawley-Crowles home. As they entered a main thoroughfare they heard the newsboys excitedly crying extras.
“Horrible suicide! Double extra! Big mining scandal! Society woman blows out brains! Double extra!”
Of a sudden a vague, unformed presentiment of impending evil came to the girl. She half rose, and clutched the Beaubien’s hand. Then there flitted through her mind like a beam of light the words of the psalmist: “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.” She sank back against the Beaubien’s shoulder and closed her eyes.
The car rolled on. Presently the chauffeur turned and said something through the speaking tube.
“What!” cried the Beaubien, springing from the seat. “Merciful heaven! Stop and get a paper at once!” The chauffeur complied.
A loud cry escaped her as she took the sheet and glanced at the startling headlines. Mrs. James Hawley-Crowles, financially ruined, and hurled to disgrace from the pinnacle of social leadership by the awful exposure of the parentage of her ward, had been found in her bedroom, dead, with a revolver clasped in her cold hand.