He gave us the location of the place with a scorn that sent us out in haste. I, at least, felt a sense of relief that I did not have to go up to the place where this unknown girl had thrown away the greatest gift. As we walked through the poorly lighted streets toward the Tottenham Court Road I felt for the first time a surge of that emotion that Leila Burton had voiced, a pity for the dead girl. And yet, stealing a look at Dick as he walked onward quietly, sadly, but with a dignity that lifted him above the sordidness of the circumstances, I felt that I could not blame him as I should. It was London, I thought, and life that had tightened the rope on the girl.
Strangely I felt a lightness of relief in the realization that the catastrophe having come, was not really as terrible as it had seemed back there in Leila's room. It was an old story that many women had conned, and since, after all, Dick Allport was yet young, and my own, I condoned the sin for the sake of the sinner; and yet, even as I held the thought close to my aching heart, I felt that I was somehow letting slip from my shoulders the cross that had been laid upon them, the cross that I should have borne, the burden of shame and sorrow for the wrong that the man I loved had done to the girl who had died for love of him.
The place where she lay, a gruesome establishment set in behind that highway of reeking cheapness, the Tottenham Court Road, was very quiet when we entered. A black-garbed man came to meet us from a room in which we saw two tall candles burning. Dick spoke to him sharply, asking if any one had come to look after the dead girl.
"No one with authority," the man whined—"just a girl as lived with her off and on."
He stood, rubbing his hands together as Dick went into hurried details with him, and I went past them into the room where the candles burned. For an instant, as I stood at the door, I had the desire to run away from it all, but I pulled myself together and went over to the place where lay the girl they had called Bessie Lowe.
I had drawn back the sheet and was standing looking down at the white face when I heard a sob in the room. I replaced the covering and turned to see in the corner the shadowy form of a woman whose eyes blazed at me out of the dark. While I hesitated, wondering if this were the girl who had lived occasionally with Bessie Lowe, she came closer, staring at me with scornful hate. Miserably thin, wretchedly nervous as she was, she had donned for the nonce a mantle of dignity that she seemed to be trailing as she approached, glaring at me with furious resentment. "So you thought as how you'd come here," she demanded of me, her crimsoned face close to my own, "to see what she was like, to see what sort of a girl had him before you took him away from her? Well, I'll tell you something, and you can forget it or remember it, as you like. Bessie Lowe was a good girl until she ran into him, and she'd have stayed good, I tell you, if he'd let her alone. She was a fool, though, and she thought that he'd marry her some day—and all the time he was only waiting until you'd take him! You never think of our kind, do you, when you're living out your lives, wondering if you care enough to marry the men who're worshipping you while they're playing with us? Well, perhaps it won't be anything to you, but, all the same, there's some kind of a God, and if He's just He'll punish you when He punishes Standish Burton!"
"But I—" I gasped. "Did you think that I—?"
"Aren't you his wife?" She came near to me, peering at me in the flickering candle-light. "Aren't you Standish Burton's wife?"
"No," I said.
"Oh, well"—she shrugged—"you're her sort, and it'll come to the same thing in the end."