I often wonder now what has befallen those brilliant stars of the half-world firmament. Emmeline d'Alençon with her "bobbed" hair, and her passionate love of animals and birds. The demure Jeanne Ray, who came out every morning to her garden gate, and distributed food to the crowd of paupers and cripples. I have seen peasants kiss the hem of her dress as she walked on an afternoon along the Promenade des Anglais. The beautiful, soulless Mérode, the fierce, stately Otero, and many others who thought nothing of wearing fifty to a hundred thousand pounds' worth of jewels on one evening.
Where are they now? If living they are old! Old! a word more dreaded by their class than death.
CHAPTER XIII
I COMMIT MURDER
I will now relate a very unpleasant experience that befell me thirty years ago, but which has by no means exhausted itself in the passage of years. It still, at long intervals, recurs to me as vividly as when first I passed through the painful hours of its unfoldment.
It was the month of July, and I was making a tour by road through a portion of Scotland, driving my own horse. I was accompanied by a groom and a maid.
One evening we arrived at a well-known inn on Deeside, where I had arranged to pass a couple of nights. I found my room ready for me, an ordinary hotel bedroom, and after supper I retired very early to bed, feeling very sleepy after a long day in the open air.
Towards morning I had a vision. I was a woman who had committed the crime of murder; and I went in hourly terror of discovery and arrest, as the police were actively in search of the criminal. Up to the present I had succeeded in evading them, and no shadow of suspicion had yet fallen upon me, but I lived in constant haunting dread that sooner or later some chance clue would direct their attention to me, and I should be arrested and brought up for trial.