"I shall be there immediately, please tell her," said Louise, making a pencilled note of the address.
Very uneasy, Louise put on her hat and long pongee coat with fluttering fingers. She felt that something serious must have happened to deflect Laura from a shopping tour to the home of a woman friend. She had not heard Laura allude to any woman friend in London named Mrs. Hammond, but that consideration did not linger more than an instant in her mind, for Laura no doubt had many London friends of whom she had not chanced to speak.
Within less than five minutes after receiving the telephoned summons, Louise was on her way in a taxicab to the address in Curzon Street. She was pale and in a tremor of uneasiness when the taxicab pulled up at the curb of a neat three-story house near the end of a row of similar houses.
So perturbed was she by the thought that she had not been told the entire truth as to what had happened to Laura that she scarcely noticed the bald, bland Gaskins when he opened the door for her and said "Miss Tre'arne?"
"Yes, yes," hastily replied Louise. "Where is Mrs. Stedham?"
"If you please, Miss, Hi shall conduct you," said Gaskins, inured by years of experience to the sort of deception he was practising; and he softly padded up the thickly-carpeted stairs in advance of her. Closely followed by Louise, who paid hardly any attention at all to the surroundings in her trepidation as to how she might find Laura, Gaskins quietly opened the front side door of the second floor apartment and held it open for her. Louise stepped into the room, and Gaskins, not entering himself, closed the door after her. She did not of course notice the click which denoted that the closed door was fitted with a spring lock. Afterwards Louise remembered having thought it odd that Gaskins did not follow her into the room to announce her, instead of so suddenly effacing himself.
Louise quickly saw that there was nobody in the charmingly arranged room—partly study, partly living room—in which she found herself. Also she noticed that it was distinctively a man's room. Wondering, but not yet affected by any fear, she made a few steps toward the portieres at the rear of the room.
She was about to reach out a hand to draw the portieres side, when they parted; and Langdon Jesse confronted her. He was trig in a big, overweight way in his lounging suit of grey; but the pallor of excitement had overspread his naturally waxy face, and his attempt at the debonair manner was proclaimed to be a mere assumption by the trembling of his hands and the huskiness of his voice when he spoke.
Louise had never swooned in her life. Now, however, at this apparition of the one human being she had ever learned to loathe, she pressed one hand to her forehead and another to her heart and swayed slightly. She feared that she would fall; but the thought rocketed through her mind that if she yielded to the almost overpowering physical weakness of the moment she would be at his mercy. By an effort of will which she afterwards remembered with wonderment, she steadied herself as if by the process of actually forcing her blood to flow evenly. She permitted her hands to fall to her sides and regarded Jesse with an appearance of calmness. In that clash of eyes, Jesse, after a very few seconds of it, turned his head away on pretence of motioning Louise to a chair. The impalement of her gaze was beyond his endurance.
Louise paid no attention to his arm-waved invitation to be seated, but stood in the spot where she had stopped when the first sight of him had almost sent her reeling. She regarded him steadily, almost incredulously; an expression of incredulity that such a thing could be.