Madame Branchard, whom his manner had reduced to, for her, marvellous quiet and ease, approached impressively and lowered her voice as deeply as it would fall.
"Mademoiselle Lascaze, whom monsieur knows has been my tenant for months past, is dead—dead, monsieur!"
Bulstrode echoed, "Dead?" and his first thought was: "It was not she, then, whom I saw striving for entrance this morning. Ah, poor creature! Drowned?"
"Monsieur then knows?"
Knows—how should he know? He had thought of the aquarium and her often repeated feat.
"Monsieur is right, she is drowned; but it is not the aquarium—it is the Seine. It appears," the wine-merchant's wife went on, "that last night she made la fête in the streets. We over here lock up, well, at a decent hour, as monsieur will understand. Those who are in stay, those who are out—well, monsieur will understand——"
Yes, he understood. Would she go on?
"Mademoiselle Lascaze had evidently lost her key of entry—so it appears. We have this story from her comrades, a bad lot, like herself. She tried to get in about five o'clock—they left her knocking at the door. She must then have wandered the streets for an hour, for it was six when they met her again by chance quite by the Pont des Arts. They all had something to drink and started across the river, when the poor thing offered to give an exhibition of her circus feat and, before anyone could stop her, had dived off the bridge into the Seine."
He had, then, seen her knocking there in the dawn, and if he had hastened a little—not held conventionally back——
"It is all en règle," assured Madame Branchard. "As my husband will tell monsieur, he has been to the morgue to identify her."