"Is Sir Stephen—My dear child, don't you know—haven't you heard?"
"Heard what?" she asked, her face beginning to grow paler, her lips set tightly.
"God bless my soul, I'm surprised!" he exclaimed. "I thought everybody had heard the news. Sir Stephen is not living at the Villa, for a very grave and all-sufficient reason: he is dead, my dear."
Ida leant back in her chair and raised a screen which she held in her hand so that it shielded her face from his gaze.
"I did not know," she said, in a very low voice. "I had not heard, I have not seen any papers, or, if I have, only the advertisement part. Dead!"
"Yes," said Mr. Wordley; "poor man, he died suddenly, quite suddenly, in the middle of a grand ball; died of the shock."
"Shock?" she echoed.
He looked at her as if he found it hard to realise her ignorance.
"Yes; the shock of the bad news. Dear me! it seems so strange that you, a neighbour, so to speak, should not have heard the story of which all London—one might almost say all England—was talking. Sir Stephen was a great financier, and had just brought out a great company to work an important concession in Africa. He was supposed to have made an enormous sum of money by it; indeed, must have done so; but at the very moment of his success there came a stroke of bad luck; and the news of it was brought to him on the night of the ball he was giving in his splendid town house. The sudden reverse meant absolute ruin, and he fell dead with the cablegram in his hand. Shocking, was it not?"
Ida's lips moved, but she could not speak. The whole scene seemed to rise before her; but, naturally enough, her thoughts were concentrated upon one figure in it, that of Stafford.