“I shall be all right in a moment,” she faltered. “I’m coming back. I sha’n’t faint. Say that over again, my lady—slowly.”
“Your husband will never be charged with the murder of the Comte de Besset,” Félice repeated, leaning over her. “The murderer was hidden in my room, and he has confessed. It will be in the papers to-night. Sir Richard Cotton, your husband’s lawyer, has a signed copy of his confession.”
“Oh, thank Gawd!” the woman groaned. “Thank Gawd! Oh, my lady!”
The tears and some strong coffee revived her, and she staggered to her feet.
“I must go,” she cried. “Perhaps they haven’t told Max. Anyway, they’ll let me see him. They’ll have to let me see him. Perhaps I’ll be the first to tell him.”
“Wait!” Félice enjoined. “I shall give you a letter to the governor of the jail and to Major Hartopp. Of course you must see him.”
Félice sat down at the desk and wrote rapidly. Then, with the letters clasped in her hand, they helped the dazed woman into the taxicab. Félice watched it rattle its way down the avenue until it became a lumbering speck in the distance.
Andrew found her there a few minutes later.
“Your father and I object to this long desertion,” he complained. “Dear old fellow, he’s coming out with me after the partridges, and he’s fussing whether he’ll take a twelve or a twenty bore. Whatever are you thinking about, sweetheart?”
She clung to him tightly.
“I was thinking,” she sighed, “that there are very many different sorts of good women in the world.”
THE END
THE CINEMA MURDER
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
With a somewhat prolonged grinding of the brakes and an unnecessary amount of fuss in the way of letting off steam, the afternoon train from London came to a standstill in the station at Detton Magna. An elderly porter, putting on his coat as he came, issued, with the dogged aid of one bound by custom to perform a hopeless mission, from the small, redbrick lamp room. The station master, occupying a position of vantage in front of the shed which enclosed the booking office, looked up and down the lifeless row of closed and streaming windows, with an expectancy dulled by daily disappointment, for the passengers who