And why was not the white-clad lady with him?
Audrey hesitated only one moment, and then, full of fears she could not have defined, ran up to the fitting-room and went in.
The room was quite dark, but she touched the electric button, and at once a flood of soft light filled the apartment.
A cry of horror broke from her lips when, turning her eyes at once towards a big divan which stood under the window, she saw lying at full length upon it the body of the woman in the white dress.
Her white hat was crushed and bent under her poor lifeless head; one hand, still in its long wrinkled white kid glove, was outstretched as if in a last convulsion; one white kid, high-heeled walking shoe lay on the floor. The white ostrich feather boa which had floated round her shoulders when Audrey saw her alive was twisted round her thin throat. The clinging white dress was bound round her motionless limbs.
And over all, dress, gloves, boa, in startling and awful contrast to the white clothes, were marks of blood: blood which had gushed out from her mouth and streamed over everything.
Audrey was aghast. Was this a murdered woman upon whose body she was looking? She could not tell. For the haggard cheeks, the glassy eyes, the laboured breath, the feeble though passionate movements, all of which signs she had noticed in the living woman, the husky voice, the occasional cough, had betrayed unmistakably the fact that the poor woman was in the last stage of consumption, and her death might well have resulted from the bursting of a blood-vessel in a moment of wild excitement.
On the other hand, the sudden disappearance of the man who had met her and dragged her away from the doorway was horribly suggestive. And the feather boa which appeared to be bound round the poor woman’s thin and wasted throat might, Audrey thought with horror, have been the means of her death.
One long look she gave before she went to call assistance. And in that look she ascertained that the dead woman must have been of surpassing beauty, for the features were regular and perfectly formed; that she was between forty and fifty years of age appeared equally certain, now that powder and paint could hide the marks of time no longer. And Audrey crept downstairs shuddering, and wondering what fate was upon her, that a second and horrible calamity should happen in her experience within little more than six weeks.
At the foot of the private staircase which led out into the street she was lucky in meeting Mademoiselle Laure, to whom she related, in faltering accents, the terrible experience she had just gone through. By this time, however, poor Audrey, giddy and faint with the scene she had gone through, could scarcely articulate, scarcely make herself intelligible to Mademoiselle Laure, who could or would speak no English.