He got up from the table and moved silently over the heavy carpet to the door.
It was about seven o'clock. At eight Constantine Schuabe was coming to the Sheridan Club to dine.
Sir Robert sat in the smoking-room with a tiny cigarette of South American tobacco, wrapped in maize leaf and tied round the centre with a tiny cord of green silk. His face expressed nothing but the most absolute repose. His correspondence with life was at that moment as complete as the most perfect health and discriminating luxury could make it.
He stretched out his feet to the blaze and idly watched the reflection in the points of his shining boots.
The room was quite silent now. A few men sat about reading the evening papers, and there was a subdued hum of talk from a table where two men were playing a casual game of chess, in which neither of them seemed much interested. A large clock upon the oak mantel-shelf ticked with muffled and soothing regularity.
Llwellyn picked up a sixpenny illustrated paper, devoted to amusements and the lighter side of life, and lazily opened it.
His eye fell upon a double-page article interspersed with photographs of actors and actresses. The article was a summing-up of the year's events on the lighter stage by an accepted expert in such matters. He read as follows:
"The six Trocadero girls whom I remember in Paris recently billed as 'The Cocktails,' never forget that grace is more important in dancing than mere agility. They are youthful looking, pretty and supple, and their manœuvres are cunningly devised. The diseuse of the troupe, Mdlle. Nepinasse, sings the Parisian success, Viens Poupoule, with considerable 'go' and swing. But in hearing her at the 'Gloucester' the other night I could not help regretting the disappearance of brilliant Gertrude Hunt from the boards where she was so great an attraction. Poupoule, or its English equivalent, is just the type of song, with its attendant descriptive dance, in which that gay little lady was seen at her best. In losing her, the musical-comedy stage has lost a player whose peculiar individuality will not easily be replaced. Gertrude Hunt stood quite alone among her sisters of the Profession. Who will readily forget the pert insouciance, the little trick of the gloved hands, the mellow calling voice? It has been announced that this popular favourite has disappeared for ever from the stage. But there is a distinct mystery about the sudden eclipse of this star, and one which conjecture and inquiry has utterly failed to solve. Well, I, in common with thousands of others, can only sigh and regret it. Yet I should like to think that these lines would meet her eye, and she may know that I am only voicing the wishes of the public when I call to her to come back and delight our eyes and ears as before."
By the side of the paragraph there was a photograph of Gertrude Hunt. He stared at it, his mind busy with memories and evil longing. The bold, handsome face, the great eyes, looked him full in the face. Never had any woman been able to hold him as this one. She had become part of his life. In his mad passion for the dancer he had risked everything, until his whole career had depended upon the good-will of Constantine Schuabe. There had been no greater pleasure than to satisfy her wishes, however tasteless, however vulgar. And then, hastening back to her side with a fortune for her (the second he had poured into the white grasping hands), he had found her with the severe young priest. A power which he was unable to understand had risen up as a bar to his enormous egoism. She had gone, utterly disappeared, vanished as a shadow vanishes at the moving of a light.
And all his resources, all those of the theatre people with whom she had been so long associated, had utterly failed to trace her.