It had all turned out so utterly unlike anything that they had ever planned. It still seemed to Elsie that catastrophe had fallen, a bolt from the blue, into the midst of their lives without warning. She still felt that none of it could be true, that she must wake as from a hideous dream.
When had she had a hideous dream—something about Horace—something like this?
Dim associations of horror and bewilderment awoke slowly within her, and brought to her the remembrance of her visit with Irene Tidmarsh to the woman who had called herself “clairvoyante.” She had talked in a deep, rather artificial voice about love and intrigue; she had bade Elsie beware of the written word. And then all of a sudden the atmosphere had altered, Madame Clara’s voice itself had altered, horribly, and she had screamed out terrifying words and phrases. “Blood, and worse than blood ... you’re all over blood! O, my God, what’s this? It’s all over England—you—they’re talking about you.”
Elsie understood. In a flash of searing, anguished intuition she understood what would happen.
With the appalling rapidity of a vision, there came to her the realisation of all that would come to pass in the near future.
She knew already that the police-court trial was the almost certain preliminary to her committal and Morrison’s for trial at the Old Bailey. They would be tried for murder.
She and the man who had been her lover would stand in the dock together as prisoners; lawyers would fight out questions concerning their past relations; people would give evidence against them—evidence in their favour; Elsie would in all probability hear her own letters to Leslie Morrison read aloud in court....
It would be a sensational trial, such as she had often followed with avidity in the newspapers.
“It’s all over England—they’re talking about you....”
But why ... why?...