“When did you hear it?” somebody asked.
“This evening, while people were on the Luneta. The police telephoned me to get her husband. He wouldn’t go—so I went,” Holborne said.
“What has happened?” Julie demanded.
Nobody replied at once, then Chad said heavily: “Leah Chamberlain threw herself out of a window of the Oriente—and dashed out her brains.”
“Ah!” The girl was still for a moment. “But why?” she demanded.
The men said nothing. Mrs. Burke, a little English woman drew her aside. “It’s never safe to ask why. Locroft was called home, he had come into the title; and—well, I suppose it was all impossible!”
Another impasse! Leah, the will-o’-the-wisp—who, every one had said, had never had a serious feeling in her gossamer existence—displaying at last a supreme, deadly seriousness. It was inevitable that one who had so completely held her life in her own hands should herself have destroyed that life. Leah would never consent to live or die except on her own terms.
Julie glanced up from where she stood frozenly considering Leah’s fate, to behold Barry coming in her direction. His invincibly lifted head quickened her. Every human thing about him sent a thrill through her deadened senses—the desert face full of visions, the ardor of life that was in him. For an instant it seemed as though she were being brought back into sanity and safety again, as if through his presence a loop-hole of escape must open up.
But immediately following these sensations there rose before her brain a vision of a horrible street with bleached faces thrust up out of the bowels of the earth. Her fingers clutched the spot where the stolen medallion had hung, the token of his spirit that had intervened between her and a monstrous fate. The chain remained intact; she thrust it down in her dress so that he might not notice that the medallion was gone.