“God knows!” he says.
It is quite true what Zai has told him.
Close to the brink of the Urling river that runs through the Sandilands estate they have found Gabrielle’s hat. How well they know it, the dainty hat with its pompon of vivid scarlet and black!
For five days they drag the river without success, but on the sixth day a human form is brought and laid on the silvery bed of sand.
A woman’s form, tall and slender like Gabrielle’s, yet so unlike, for it is terrible to look upon. The light summer dress she wore is tattered and draggled and discoloured beyond recognition, and the face,—but none who have known her can look twice on the fearful lineaments that the water have so cruelly caressed and changed.
Not even her own father can believe that this awful thing lying at his feet can be all that is left of his beautiful daughter, Gabrielle Beranger.
* * * * *
Again Lady Beranger has to mourn like her fellow “quality” in “deep kilts”—procured on credit—but this time she has a certain satisfaction in it, which she salves down her conscience with by saying:
“Gabrielle was such a queer girl that she must have come to an out-of-the-way end. She was so fast, so bizarre, so dreadfully indifferent to the bienséances and the convenances, you know, and, dear Marchioness, is it not far better to have drowned herself than to have gone to the bad?”
The Marchioness, who has had a jeunesse orageuse herself, shakes her dyed curls solemnly and virtuously.