a gleam of sunlight that found its way between the blinds fell upon a piece of white petticoat.  Lady Helen lay in the bed, thrown back low down on the pillow, the chin raised high, emphasizing a line of strained white throat.  She lay in shadow and firelight, her cheek touched by the light.  Around her eyes the shadows gathered, and as a landscape retains for an hour some impression of the day which is gone, so a softened and hallowed trace of life lingered upon her.

Then the facts of the case were told.  She had driven up to the hotel in a hansom.  She had asked if No. 57 was occupied, and on being told it was not, said she would take it; mentioning at the same time that she had missed her train, and would not return home till late in the afternoon.  She had told the housemaid to light a fire, and had then dismissed her.  Nothing more was known; but as the porter explained, it was clear she had gone to bed so as to make sure of shooting herself through the heart.

“The pistol is still in her hand; we never disturb anything till after the doctor has completed his examination.”

Each felt the chill of steel against the naked side, and seeing the pair of stays on the table, they calculated its resisting force.

Harding mused on the ghastly ingenuity, withal so strangely reasonable.  Thompson felt he would give his very life to make a sketch.  Mike wondered what her lover was like.  Frank was overwhelmed in sentimental sorrow.  John’s soul was full of strife and suffering.  He had sacrificed his poems, and had yet ventured in revels which had led to such results!  Then as they went down-stairs, Harding gave the porter Lewis Seymour’s name and address, and said he should be sent for at once.

CHAPTER VI

“I don’t say we have never had a suicide here before, sir,” said the porter in reply to Harding as they descended the steps of the hotel; “but I don’t see how we are to help it.  Whenever the upper classes want to do away with themselves they chose one of the big hotels—­the Grosvenor, the Langham, or ourselves.  Indeed they say more has done the trick in the Langham than ’ere, I suppose because it is more central; but you can’t get behind the motives of such people.  They never think of the trouble and the harm they do us; they only think of themselves.”

London was now awake; the streets were a-clatter with cabs; the pick of the navvy resounded; night loiterers were disappearing and giving place to hurrying early risers.  In the resonant morning the young men walked together to the Corner.  There they stopped to bid each other good-bye.  John called a cab, and returned home in intense mental agitation.

“It really is terrible,” said Mike.  “It isn’t like life at all, but some shocking nightmare.  What could have induced her to do it?”

“That we shall probably never know,” said Thompson; “and she seemed brimming over with life and fun.  How she did dance! ...”