At the door of the boarding-house he asked for Mrs. Duvernois, and then corrected himself, saying, "I mean Mrs. Leighton."
He must have had singular emotions at the moment, yet the servant-girl noticed nothing singular in his demeanor.
Mrs. Leighton could not be found. None of the family had seen her enter or go out: it was not known that she had been in the house for an hour.
"But there comes Doctor Leighton," remarked the girl as the visitor turned to leave.
Even in this frightful conjuncture the characteristic coolness of Duvernois did not forsake him: after a moment's hesitation and a quick glance at his rival, he said, "I do not know him: I will call again."
On the graveled walk which led from the yard gate to the doorstep the two men met and passed without a word--the face of the one as inexpressive of the strangeness and horror of the encounter as the mind of the other was unconscious of them.
Leighton immediately missed Alice. In a quarter of an hour he became anxious: in an hour he was in furious search of her.
Somewhat later, when Duvernois came once more to the house, accompanied by a fashionably-dressed youth, who, as it subsequently appeared, was his younger brother, he found the family and the neighborhood in wild alarm over the disappearance of Mrs. Leighton. The two at once returned to the hotel, procured saddle-horses and joined in the general chase.
It was ten o'clock at night, and the moon was shining with a vaporous, spectral light, when the maddest of chances brought the two husbands together over a body which the tide, with its multitudinous cold fingers, had gently laid upon the beach.
Leighton leaped from his horse, lifted the corpse with a loud cry, and covered the white wet face with kisses.