It was more like an elegant boudoir in an old English country house than a bedroom, and for a moment she wondered, bewildered, where she could be.
Then suddenly she remembered—remembered everything; and her heart filled, brimmed over, with seething pain and a sharp, overwhelming sensation of fear.
Jack had gone: disappeared: vanished as if the earth had swallowed him up! And she, Nancy, was alone in a foreign city where she did not know a single soul, with the paramount exception of the American strangers who had come to her help in so kindly and so generous a fashion.
She pushed her soft hair back from her forehead, and tried to recall, step by step, all that had happened yesterday.
Two facts started out clearly—her almost painful gratitude to the Burtons and her shrinking terror of the Poulains, or rather of Madame Poulain, the woman who had looked fixedly into her face and lied.
As to what had happened to Dampier, Nancy's imagination began to whisper things of unutterable dread. If her Jack had been possessed of a large sum of money she would have suspected the hotel people of having murdered him….
But no, she and Jack had come to the end of the ample provision of gold and bank-notes with which they had started for Italy. As is the way with most prosperous newly-married folk, they had spent a good deal more on their short honeymoon than they had reckoned to do. He had said so the day before yesterday, in the train, when within an hour of Paris. Indeed he had added that one of the first things they must do the next day must be to call at the English bank where he kept an account.
She now told herself that she had to face the possibility, nay the probability, that her husband had met with some serious accident on his way to the Impasse des Nonnes. Nancy knew that this had been Gerald Burton's theory, and of her three new kind friends it was Gerald Burton who impressed her with the greatest trust and confidence. He, unlike his father, had at once implicitly believed her version of what had taken place when she and Jack arrived at the Hôtel Saint Ange.
The bedroom door opened, cautiously, quietly, and Daisy Burton came in carrying a tray in her pretty graceful hands.
Poor Nancy! She felt confused, grateful, and a little awkward. She had not realised that her nervous dread of Madame Poulain would mean that this kind girl must wait on her.