Doubtless, so Clare decided, Laline was at present drawing back and holding Lorin off only in order to pique him into an immediate union; and Miss Cavan set her short, sharp, white teeth vindictively together as she planned destruction to Laline's schemes.
"Of course she married the one cousin for his money, and probably found him a brute and ran away from him. Then she must have trusted to not meeting him or to his not recognising her when she set to work to get hold of the other! What consummate impudence! I really almost admire her for it. Now if I can only find Wallace Armstrong the elder, and find him sober, I shall be the blessed means of restoring a missing wife to a loving husband's arms."
A very unpleasant smile curved her thin scarlet lips as she reflected thus while completing a hasty outdoor toilet before the looking-glass in her room. Opening her door, she stealthily crept out to listen for sounds from the floor below; then, reassured by the perfect stillness, she fled noiselessly down and out of the house, sprang into a hansom in the High Street, and directed the driver to Wallace Armstrong's lodgings off the Strand, where once before she had called in order to deliver "A Well-Wisher's" warning letter.
Mr. Armstrong was out, Clare was informed by an elderly housekeeper, who gazed at her with evident suspicion, and who evidently disapproved of a beautiful and well-dressed young lady calling at the rooms of a handsome and dissipated bachelor at nine o'clock in the evening.
But Clare was too much excited to be sensitive on this point, and at once begged for an envelope and a piece of paper, upon which she scribbled an emphatic mandate to Wallace to come at once to St. Mary's Crescent on receipt of her message at any time before midnight.
"Drive very slowly along the Strand," she told her driver, when she left the house; "I am looking out for some one."
Laline's evil star was in the ascendant that night, for Clare's cab had not proceeded many yards, with its occupant craning her neck out of it, when she suddenly signalled to the driver to stop.
For there, before her eyes, lurching along the Strand, with his hands in his pockets, on his way from one drinking-bar to another, was the object of her search—Wallace Armstrong, Laline's husband.
Laline's husband! Clare's heart leaped in triumph at the thought, which amply avenged her for any slights and disappointments Laline had unwittingly caused her to suffer.