She sat down wondering, almost confused.
Mechanically she let her right hand drop on to the seat beside her. She was so accustomed when travelling to have her jewel-case beside her that her hand must have missed it though her thoughts were far from it. For immediately after dropping her hand she looked down.
The jewel-case was gone.
Instantly her feeling of confusion was swept away; instantly she understood.
She had been caught in a trap by a clever member of the swell mob operating with a confederate. While she had been on the platform, to which she had been deliberately enticed, the confederate had entered the compartment from the line, through the doorway on the right-hand side of her carriage, and had carried off the jewel-case.
The revelation of the truth almost stunned something in her. Yet she was able to think quite clearly. She did nothing. She just sat still and understood, and went on understanding, while the train quickened its pace on its way towards the sea.
By the time it slowed down, and the dull houses of Calais appeared, she had made up her mind about the future. Her vanity had received at last a mortal blow. The climax had come. It was not what she had expected, but her imp—less satirical now than desperately tragic and powerfully persuasive, told her that it was what she deserved. And she bowed her head to his verdict, not with tears, but with a cold and stormy sense of finality.
When the train stopped at the harbour station her maid appeared in the corridor.
“Shall I take the jewel-case, my lady?”
Lady Sellingworth stood up. She had not decided what to say to her maid. She was taken by surprise. As she stood, her tall figure concealed the seat on which the jewel-case had been lying. For an instant she looked at the maid in silence. Perhaps the expression of her face as strange, for after a pause the maid said anxiously: