He looked down at her, touched, moved, his eyes very tender, but sad as though with a divination of the barrier his fortune eternally raised between them.

The door opened suddenly and Mrs. Marshall-Smith came in quickly, not looking at them at all.  From the pale agitation of her face they recoiled, startled and alarmed.  She sat down abruptly as though her knees had given way under her.  Her gloved hands were perceptibly trembling in her lap.  She looked straight at Sylvia, and for an instant did not speak.  If she had rushed in screaming wildly, her aspect to Sylvia’s eyes would scarcely have been more eloquent of portentous news to come.  It was a fitting introduction to what she now said to them in an unsteady voice:  “I’ve just heard—­a despatch from Jamiaca—­something terrible has happened.  The news came to the American Express office when I was there.  It is awful.  Molly Sommerville driving her car alone—­an appalling accident to the steering-gear, they think.  Molly found dead under the car.”

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE ROAD IS NOT SO CLEAR

It shocked Sylvia that Molly’s death should make so little difference.  After one sober evening with the stunning words fresh before their eyes, the three friends quickly returned to their ordinary routine of life.  It was not that they did not care, she reflected—­she did care.  She had cried and cried at the thought of that quivering, vital spirit broken by the inert crushing mass of steel—­she could not bring herself to think of the soft body, mangled, bloody.  Austin cared too:  she was sure of it; but when they had expressed their pity, what more could they do?  The cabled statement was so bald, they hardly could believe it—­they failed altogether to realize what it meant—­they had no details on which to base any commentary.  She who had lived so intensely, was dead.  They were sorry for her.  That was all.

As an apology for their seeming callousness they reiterated Aunt Victoria’s dictum:  “We can know nothing about it until Felix comes.  Let us hold our minds in suspense until we know what to think.”  That Morrison would be in Paris soon, none of them doubted.  Indeed, they united in insisting on the number of natural—­oh, perfectly natural—­reasons for his coming.  He had always spent a part of every winter there, had in fact a tiny apartment on the Rue St. Honore which dated from his bachelor life; and now he had a double reason for coming, since much of Molly’s fortune chanced to be in French bonds.  Her father had been (among other things) American agent for the Comptoir National des Escomptes, and he had taken advantage of his unusual opportunities for acquiring solid French and remunerative Algerian securities.  Page had said at once that Morrison would need to go through a good many formalities, under the French laws.  So pending fuller information, they did not discuss the tragedy.  Their lives ran on, and Molly, dead, was in their minds almost as little as Molly, living but absent, had been.