There was the sound of quick, light running up the front stairs, a key was turned in the lock, the front door swung open, and the girl in the chair, startled from her huddled misery, sprang to her feet and fairly leaped to meet the newcomer. She cried out, but whether in warning or in the joy of greeting could not be said, for her voice was half-smothered in a sob.
“Sister!” she said at last falteringly. “Sister, please go to your room. It is only some more policemen about Mr. Monteagle!” The words came chokingly. The other had not as yet come into our sight, but now she stepped into the light that streamed from the parlour into the hall—and I heard Lanagan’s swift, involuntary ejaculation:
“La Pattini! Her sister!”
Leslie, swift as thought, was half-across the parlour floor to the hall, yielding to a natural police impulse, but the newcomer, the other girl clinging to her, stepped fully into the doorway to the parlour.
“Yes,” she said in a voice that had no tremour of emotion, “La Pattini. Her sister. Why?”
“Why?” said Leslie, grimly. “Because we were just going to book her for murder as an accessory before the fact. We will switch the cut now and book you as the principal.”
At the feet of the queenly Pattini the harassed sister swooned. Lanagan pulled shut the door leading to the hall so that no one might by any mischance disturb us, and I fell to chafing the wrists of the senseless girl.
La Pattini sank wearily to a chair, stooping so that she could stroke her sister’s temples.
“I am glad it is over,” she said, apathetically. “I have only wondered that it did not come sooner. I have expected it hourly.”
The story was soon told: simple, age-old, but ever new, sordid possibly to a slight degree, but profoundly sad. She who was now known as La Pattini met Monteagle while visiting her sister at his office. He had found means to extend the acquaintance, had aided her in a secret way in her ambitions for the stage, securing the engagement at the Continental for her, and as a result of the clandestine relation there had been a promise of marriage. Then had come the engagement announcement of the Dennison-Monteagle marriage and the awakening of the dupe. But this was not the dupe of Monteagle’s many experiences. The picture of Miss Dennison, staring at her from the society columns, had fired a sinister jealousy.