During the afternoon a ray of hope flashed upon me.  Mrs. Sullivan Smith was at the Hotel du Rhin, so Rosa had said; I would call on her.  I remembered her strange demeanor to me on the occasion of our first meeting, and afterwards at the reception.  It seemed clear to me now that she must have known something.  Perhaps she might help me.

I found her in a garish apartment too full of Louis Philippe furniture, robed in a crimson tea-gown, and apparently doing nothing whatever.  She had the calm quiescence of a Spanish woman.  Yet when she saw me her eyes burned with a sudden dark excitement.

“Carl,” she said, with the most staggering abruptness, “you are dying.”

“How do you know?” I said morosely.  “Do I look it?”

“Yet the crystal warned you!” she returned, with apparent but not real inconsequence.

“I want you to tell me,” I said eagerly, and with no further pretence.  “You must have known something then, when you made me look in the crystal.  What did you know—­and how?”

She sat a moment in thought, stately, half-languid, mysterious.

“First,” she said, “let me hear all that has happened.  Then I will tell you.”

“Is Sullivan about?” I asked.  I felt that if I was to speak I must not be interrupted by that good-natured worldling.

“Sullivan,” she said a little scornfully, with gentle contempt, “is learning French billiards.  You are perfectly safe.”  She understood.

Then I told her without the least reservation all that had happened to me, and especially my experiences of the previous night.  When I had finished she looked at me with her large sombre eyes, which were full of pity, but not of hope.  I waited for her words.

“Now, listen,” she said.  “You shall hear.  I was with Lord Clarenceux when he died.”

“You!” I exclaimed.  “In Vienna!  But even Rosa was not with him.  How—­”

“Patience!  And do not interrupt me with questions.  I am giving away a secret which carries with it my—­my reputation.  Long before my marriage I had known Lord Clarenceux.  He knew many women; I was one of them.  That affair ended.  I married Sullivan.

“I happened to be in Vienna at the time Lord Clarenceux was taken with brain fever.  I was performing at a music-hall on the Prater.  There was a great rage then for English singers in Vienna.  I knew he was alone.  I remembered certain things that had passed between us, and I went to him.  I helped to nurse him.  He was engaged to Rosa, but Rosa was far away, and could not come immediately.  He grew worse.  The doctors said one day that he must die.  That night I was by his bedside.  He got suddenly up out of bed.  I could not stop him:  he had the strength of delirium.  He went into his dressing-room, and dressed himself fully, even to his hat, without any assistance.

“‘Where are you going?’ I said to him.

“‘I am going to her,’ he said.  ’These cursed doctors say I shall die.  But I sha’n’t.  I want her.  Why hasn’t she come?  I must go and find her.’