Her dictation was interrupted by the abrupt entrance of Madame Cimmino.
"Look!" the latter exclaimed with an excited gesture toward the window. "It is Louise Dana, but in what haste! Without a hat, too, in this most detestable of climates! Is it that something has happened? An accident?"
She spoke lightly, but her eyes smouldered as they met Mrs. Atterbury's, and the rouge stood out in patches of vivid scarlet against the sudden pallor which blanched her cheeks.
Mrs. Dana was running swiftly up the path from the gate, her meretriciously golden head bare and gleaming in the sunlight. A cloak had been flung carelessly about her figure, but as she sped past the window Betty noted that her feet were encased in the thinnest of boudoir slippers.
With a murmured ejaculation Mrs. Atterbury hurried from the room followed by Madame Cimmino, and the girl was left to her own thoughts. A bell pealed wildly through the house and its echo had not died away when there came a slam of the front door and a piercing cry which reached even to the secluded library, although Betty could only distinguish a word or two.
"Mortie—caught—help—!"
"Good God!" It was unmistakably Wolvert's voice but shaken with the same craven fear which had actuated it on the day of Betty's arrival. "What do you mean by coming here? Do you want to give us all—"
"Silence!" Mrs. Atterbury dominated him and after a confused murmur from which not a separate word could be gleaned another door closed and the hysterical sobs of Louise Dana were hushed.
What had happened to bring that woman in terror to the house? For it was mortal terror which had distorted her face as she passed the window and had rung in her desperate cry. She had come for help, but what help could she find there? Betty remembered her single meeting with the florid middle-aged man whose eyes were lined with weariness and dissipation. What had he "caught," or was it that he himself had been caught in some difficulty?
For half an hour Betty restlessly paced the library, fearing to venture forth lest she be suspected of eavesdropping yet longing to escape to her own room. The hum of a motor drew her to the window, and she reached it in time to see the familiar bizarre stripes of Mrs. Atterbury's own car whirl past and down the drive, with a fleeting glimpse of a golden head within it. Whatever her trouble, the woman had not remained to add its shadow to those already clustering about the household.