“Can’t say yet, dear. I must feel my way somehow.”
“Perhaps something fresh and helpful will come out in court to-morrow,” said Winnie hopefully.
CHAPTER XIV THE GIRL AT THE GRAVE
The beautiful little Russian church was filled to the very doors for the solemn and stately ceremonial of Paula Rawson’s funeral service. Many representatives of royalty were there, Lord Warrington and several of his staff, cabinet ministers, ambassadors, peers—everyone who was “anyone” in the innermost circle of London society seemed to be present, except Sir Robert Rawson himself.
And yet to Austin Starr’s acutely sympathetic and impressionable mind it seemed that there were no mourners there; that all these distinguished people had assembled as a mere conventional duty, an expression of conventional respect and sympathy for the bereaved husband; that they cared nothing for the dead woman lying there in her coffin, under the magnificent purple pall. She was even lonelier in death than she had been in life.
The impression was confirmed when at last the service was over, and the congregation emerged into the gloom and mud of the streets, for it was a damp, dark, dreary morning.
Crowds of sightseers thronged the pavements outside, waiting and watching, palpably animated by their curiosity to witness one of the acts in this sensational drama of real life that had already proved so thrilling, and that had yet to be played out.
There were more crowds outside the cemetery gates, through which only members of the funeral party were admitted; and open expressions of surprise and disappointment were exchanged at the smallness of the cortège: only a couple of motor-cars and some half-dozen taxicabs followed the flower-laden hearse.