While she was still engaged there, late in the afternoon, her fellow-lodgers were discussing the details of a horrible and mysterious murder that had been perpetrated in the city, the night previous, but only discovered that morning. It was in all the evening papers, forming the sensation of the hour.
In the same paper was a short paragraph, stating that:
“The body of an unknown woman, suspected to be that of Mrs. Tudor Hereward, wife of the Congressman from that district, a young lady who had disappeared from her home some weeks before, had been found in the woods bordering Cave Creek, near Frosthill, in West Virginia. A wound on the back of the head indicated that she had been the victim of tramps.”
That was all. If any one read it they paid but little attention to it; their imaginations being engrossed by the details of the more shocking tragedy in their midst.
At dinner in the evening the dreadful occurrence was discussed.
After dinner, Lilith took up the paper from the parlor table, not to read the details of the murder—her whole soul shrank in loathing from such a subject—but to look at the Congressional news, as she had looked at it daily since her flight from her home, to see if any mention was made of her husband.
But there was none. Not once since she parted with him on that bitter night at the Cliffs had she seen his name. The once active, industrious, irrepressible Hereward seemed to have dropped out of the Congressional debates.
This continued silence sometimes caused Lilith serious anxiety. Was Tudor ill? she asked herself, and then quickly repressed her rising anxiety with the recollection of that bitter taunt, which, like a poisoned arrow, had left an incurable, festering wound which daily ate deeper and deeper into her spirit.
At length Lilith put away the paper, without having seen the paragraph that concerned her so much that it might have changed the whole current of her life.
The next day, at the appointed hour, she went again to the hotel to see Madame Von Bruyin.