Audrey had already demurred to the assumption of this high-sounding title, but she had given way, feeling herself to be in safe hands with regard to worldly knowledge on such matters, and being moreover glad to hide herself from public curiosity by dropping her own too well-known name.
So she was known to her employees only as Madame Rocada.
And on the very day when this announcement went forth in the press, Audrey found herself overwhelmed by a surprising flow of evidently wealthy customers, both men and women, all well dressed, all curious, all with money to spend, who crowded her rooms from before luncheon-time to within an hour of dinner.
There was a look about these curious customers, an obvious and haughty inquisitiveness about the women, an elaborate courtesy on the part of the men, which Audrey did not like. And she told herself that they had probably found out who she was, and that they had come to stare at her and to gossip about her and “the way she took it”.
When they were all gone, the lights turned down, when the assistants had filed out, and the costly dresses and plumed hats had been shrouded in wraps and put away, Audrey, worn out, wounded and miserable, flung herself face downwards on one of the luxurious couches which had been crowded that day with idle visitors, and burst into bitter tears.
A rapid step in the next room, which was another showroom, divided from this only by a handsome portière, the sound of a sharply drawn breath, and then a peal of wild, hysterical laughter, startled her and made her spring to her feet.
CHAPTER IV
Standing in the doorway, grasping the portière tightly with her right hand, while her left was pressed against her breast, was a tall, thin woman, dressed from head to foot in white. Seen thus in the dim light of the darkened room, her clinging draperies of some soft, semi-transparent material swathed round her slight form and forming billows of white foam about her feet, her pale face, out of which two great eyes shone like lamps in the darkness, the slow, swaying movement of her body in the opening between the two rooms, all combined to give her an uncanny appearance, to suggest a ghostly vision rather than a woman of flesh and blood.
Even the hoarse laugh she uttered when Audrey sprang up and turned to face her, sounded like the unearthly, weird cry of a lost soul rather than an utterance of living human lips.
Audrey was struck dumb. She saw at once that the strange visitor had come with hostile intent, she read anger, spiteful, bitter anger in her thin face, in the convulsive movements of her gloved fingers.