“Why, no, miss, there ain't nobody stirring yet, and besides——”
“Then don't mention it to a soul. Will you do me that great, great kindness?”
“Down't ye know I will, mum?” said Liza, with a twinkle of the eye and a wag of the head.
Glory dressed hurriedly, went down to the drawing-room, and wrote a letter. It was to Sefton, the manager. “Do not expect me to play to-night. I don't feel up to it. Sorry to be so troublesome.”
Then Rosa came in with another newspaper in her hand, and, without saying anything, Glory showed her the letter. Rosa read it and returned it in silence. They understood each other.
During the next few hours Glory's impatience became feverish, and as soon as the first of the evening papers appeared she sent out for it. The panic was subsiding, and the people who had gone to the outskirts were returning to the city in troops, looking downcast and ashamed. No news of Father Storm. Inquiry that morning at Scotland Yard elicited the fact that nothing had yet been heard of him. There was much perplexity as to where he had spent the previous night.
Glory's face tingled and burned. From hour to hour she sent out for new editions. The panic itself was now eclipsed by the interest of John Storm's disappearance. His followers scouted the idea that he had fled from London. Nevertheless, he had fallen. As a pretender to the gift of prophecy his career was at an end, and his crazy system of mystical divinity was the laughing-stock of London.
“It does not surprise us that this second Moses, this mock Messiah, has broken down. Such men always do, and must collapse, but that the public should ever have taken seriously a movement which——” and then a grotesque list of John's followers—one pawnbroker, one waiter, one “knocker-up,” two or three apprentices, etc.
As she read all this, Glory was at the same time glowing with shame, trembling with fear, and burning with indignation. She dined with Rosa alone, and they tried to talk of other matters. The effort was useless. At last Rosa said:
“I have to follow this thing up for the paper, dear, and I'm going to-night to see if they hold the usual service in his church.”