The two guests looked at one another, and broke into a strained laugh. Then they calmed their faces again, and went back up the stair.
“And I was envying that man a minute ago,” said one of them. “Well, ‘all flesh is but grass,’ as the poor beggar would say himself. Shows how little you can gauge a man’s finances from seeing what he spends. I say, bet you a fiver my wife goes to the trial. She knows a judge.”
The music stopped at the end of a polka, and the gabble of talk burst promptly out with a clatter, and was carried about all over the house. But by degrees it hushed, and in its place grew the rustle of whispers. The scandal microbe travels quicker than his cousin of cholera. Curious glances were cast over the banisters by men and women, who half hoped, half feared to see their host led away in custody.
Some were sorry; some were shocked; a few were grimly glad. The band broke out into “El Dorado;” and, being the best band in London, it played it so that the very chairs tried to jig about and dance of their own accord. But no leather sole kissed the glistening parquet of the ballroom. The only things that moved there were the music-players, and a tatter of tulle which whirled about to the gale of the cornet. The guests in that house were running from it as though the black plague had broken out. The police had withdrawn their cordon from the bottom of the staircase, and were leaving the spot, as the careful Mr. Shelf had done some short time earlier.
Mrs. Theodore Shelf stood like a woman mazed. She could not change color, for happily that was fixed, according to the canons of the day; but she posed herself erectly behind a chair in the drawing-room, and gripped with her gloved hands upon the back, till muscles arose in her plump white arms which had never shown there before. Through the doorless doorway she saw an unbroken stream of her guests, cloaked and shawled, making their way to the head of the stair. Most kept their looks studiously before them; and of the few who cast her a glance, half-scared, half-curious, few added the smallest ghost of a bow.
Of all that wondrous crowd, no women at all, and two men only, came up to her before they went. One said, “Good night, Mrs. Shelf.” The other said, “Good night, Laura; I’m very sorry.”
Then these followed the rest; and, when all had gone, a white-faced servant came up and told her what had happened. The police had been quick with their search, but the man they wanted had been quicker. He had left the house ten minutes before they arrived.
“Is that all?”