“Am I? Well, never mind. We will talk about my eccentricity later. Here is Cyrus.”
Kilfane was standing in the entrance to the stage door of the theatre at which he was playing. As the car drew up he lifted two leather grips on to the step, and Mareno, descending, took charge of them.
“Come along, Mollie,” said Kilfane, looking back.
Miss Gretna, very excited, ran out and got into the car beside Rita. Pyne lowered two of the collapsible seats for Kilfane and himself, and the party set out for Limehouse.
“Oh!” cried the fair-haired Mollie, grasping Rita’s hand, “my heart began palpitating with excitement the moment I woke up this morning! How calm you are, dear.”
“I am only calm outside,” laughed Rita.
The joie de vivre and apparently unimpaired vitality, of this woman, for whom (if half that which rumor whispered were true) vice had no secrets, astonished Rita. Her physical resources were unusual, no doubt, because the demand made upon them by her mental activities was slight.
As the car sped along the Strand, where theatre-goers might still be seen making for tube, omnibus, and tramcar, and entered Fleet Street, where the car and taxicab traffic was less, a mutual silence fell upon the party. Two at least of the travellers were watching the lighted windows of the great newspaper offices with a vague sense of foreboding, and thinking how, bound upon a secret purpose, they were passing along the avenue of publicity. It is well that man lacks prescience. Neither Rita nor Sir Lucien could divine that a day was shortly to come when the hidden presses which throbbed about them that night should be busy with the story of the murder of one and disappearance of the other.
Around St. Paul’s Churchyard whirled the car, its engine running strongly and almost noiselessly. The great bell of St. Paul’s boomed out the half-hour.
“Oh!” cried Mollie Gretna, “how that made me jump! What a beautifully gloomy sound!”