"Dooced awkward, don't you know, Miss Harris asking questions."
"She ought to have broken off her engagement long ago."
Louisa, left alone with her father, could allow her nerves to ease their fearful tension. She had no need to hide from him the painful quiver of her lips, or the anxious frown across her brow.
"Do you know," she asked, "anything about this awful business, father?"
"There's a lot of gossip," he replied: his voice was not only gruff but hoarse, which showed that he was strangely moved.
"But," she insisted, "some truth in the gossip?"
"They say Philip de Mountford has been murdered."
"Some people have come on from the theatres, and men from the clubs. The streets are full of it--and evening papers have brought out midnight editions which are selling like hot cakes."
"And do they say that Luke has killed Philip de Mountford?"
"No"--with some hesitation--"they don't say that."
"I understand," he explained, "that at nine o'clock or thereabouts two men in evening dress hailed a passing taxicab just outside the Lyric Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue and told the chauffeur to drive to Hyde Park corner, just by the railings of the Green Park. The driver drew up there and one of the two men got out. As he reclosed the door of the cab he leaned toward the interior and said cheerfully, "S'long old man. See you to-morrow." Then he told the chauffeur to drive on to 1 Cromwell Road opposite the museum, and turning on his heel disappeared in the fog. When the chauffeur drew up for the second time no one alighted from the cab. So he got down from his box and opened the door."
"The other man," murmured Louisa vaguely, "was in the cab--dead!"
"With his throat pierced from ear to ear by a sharp instrument which might have been a skewer."
The room was swaying round her: the furniture started hopping and dancing. Louisa, who had never fainted in her life, felt as if the floor was giving way under her feet. Memory was unloading one of her storehouses, looking over the contents of a hidden cell, wherein she had put away a strange winter scene in Brussels, a taxicab, the ill-lighted boulevard, the chauffeur getting down from his box and finding a man crouched in the farther corner of the cab--dead--with his throat pierced from ear to ear by an instrument which might have been a skewer. And memory was raking out that cell, clearing it in every corner, trying to find the recollection of a certain morning in Battersea Park a year ago, when Louisa recounted her impressions of that weird scene and told the tale of this crime which she had almost witnessed. Memory found a distinct impression that she had told the tale at full length and with all the details which she knew. She remembered talking it all over, and, that when she did so, the ground in Battersea Park was crisp with the frost under her feet, and an inquisitive robin perched himself on the railings and then flew away accompanying her and another all the way along as far as the gates.