The season was dying hard. Lady Leominster's ball, at the great old house at Fulham, was the last flash of an expiring fire. The Houses of Parliament had closed their historic doors. The walls of the Royal Academy had been stripped of their masterpieces, and empty themselves, looked down upon dusty emptiness. All the best theatres were shut; London was practically empty. The few thousand lingerers in a wilderness of deserted streets bewailed the inanity of the daily Press. There was nothing in the morning papers; and the evening papers were worse, since they were obliged to echo the morning nothingness.

The people who never read books were longing for something startling in those indispensable papers, were it even a declaration of war. Suddenly their longing was satisfied. The morning papers were devoured with eagerness. The evening paper was waited for with feverish expectancy. All of a sudden the great army of the brainless found themselves with something to think about, something to talk about, something upon which to build up hypotheses, to which, once built, they adhered with a fierce persistency.

There had been a murder. A murder in the heart of London, in one of the fine houses of the West End; not one of the finest, for, after all, spacious and splendid as the house might be, it was not like Berkeley or Devonshire, Lansdowne or Stafford. It was only one in a row of spacious houses, the house of a foreign financier, a man who dealt in millions, and who was himself the owner of millions.

Mario Provana had been murdered in his own house—shot through the heart by an unknown assassin, who had done his work well enough to leave no clue to his identity. Speculation might rove at will, theory and hypothesis might run riot. Here was endless talk for dinner-tables—inexhaustible copy for the newspaper.

A man of great wealth, of exalted position in the world of finance—finance, not commerce. Here was no dealer in commodities, no manufacturer of cocoa, or sugar, or reels of cotton, but a man who dealt in the world's wealth, and could make peace or war by opening or closing his money-bags.

People who had never seen the great man's face in the flesh were just as keenly interested in the circumstances of his death as the people who had dined at his table and had known him as intimately as such men ever are known. A rough print of his photograph was in every halfpenny paper, and the likeness of his beautiful young wife was travestied in some of them. Pictures of the house in Portland Place, front and back view, were in all the papers. Columns of picturesque reporting described the man and the house, the beautiful young wife, the sumptuous furniture, the numerous household, the splendid entertainments which had made the house famous for the last six or seven years.

And for the murdered man himself, no details were omitted. Interviews were invented, in which, during the last year, Signor Provana had expounded his opinions and views of that sphere of life in which he exercised so vast an influence—his ideas political, his tastes in art and literature, music, and the drama. Minute descriptions of his person were given in the same glowing style. The picturesque reporter made the dead man alive again for the million readers who were panting for details that would help them to strengthen their own pet theory or to crush an opponent.

Thousands of sensation-hunters went to Portland Place to look at the house that held that dreadful mystery of a life untimely cut short by the hand of a murderer. Loafers stood on the pavement and gazed and gazed, as if their hungry eyes would have pierced dead walls and darkened windows. The loafers knew that the house was in charge of the police, and that a vigilant watch was being kept there. They wondered whether the lovely young wife was in the house. They pictured her weeping alone in one of those darkened rooms; yet were inclined to think that her friends would have insisted on her leaving that house of gloom, and would have carried her off to some less terrible place for rest and comfort.

The first idea was the correct one. Vera was lying in that spacious bed-chamber behind three windows on the second floor, where ivy-leaved geraniums were falling in showers of pale pink blossom from the flower-boxes. She was lying on the vast Italian bed, lying like a stone figure, while Susan Amphlett sat by the bed, and wept and sighed, with intervals of vague, consoling speech, till, finding that speech elicited no reply, and indeed seemed unheard, she had at last, in sheer vacuity of mind, to take refuge in the first book within reach of her hand.

It was one among many small volumes on a table by the bed—Omar KhÁyyam.

"Oh, what a dreary book," thought Susie, who was beginning to feel her office of consoler something of a burden.

She had hated entering that dreadful house, as she always called it in her thoughts, since she had heard of the murder; and now to be sitting there in that deadly silence, in that grey light from shrouded windows, to be sitting there with the knowledge that only a little way off, in another darkened room at the back of the dreadful house, there lay death in its most appalling form, was a kind of martyrdom for which Susie was unprepared, and which she was not constituted to suffer calmly or lightly. As she had hated old age, so, with a deeper hate, she hated death. To hear of it, to be forced to think of it, was agonising; and to visualise the horror lying so near her, a murdered man in his bloodstained shroud, made her start up from her easy chair and begin to roam about the room in restlessness and fear.

She lifted the edge of a blind and peered into the street.

The sight of the people staring up at the house was comforting. They were alive. There were people standing in the road, looking up with widened eyes, so absorbed in what they saw, or wanted to see, that they ran a risk of sudden annihilation from a motor-car, and skipped off to the opposite pavement, there to content themselves with a more distant view.

"There never was such a murder," Susie said to herself. "I think every soul in town must have come to look at this horrid house since eleven o'clock this morning."

It was now past three, in a dull, sultry afternoon. Susie spent all the intervening hours in the silent room in the dreadful house. She was sorry for her friend; but she was still more sorry for herself. All those hours of silent horror, without any luncheon, and no good done! What was the use of sitting by the bed where a woman lay dumb and motionless, unconsoled by affectionate murmurs from a bosom friend, apparently unconscious that the friend was there.

Lady Susan called in Hanover Square on her way home, and ordered a black frock, lustreless silk that would stand alone, with a shimmer of sequins flashing through crÊpe: not this week's fashion, nor last week's, but the fashion of the week after next. The style that was coming; not the style that had come. This was her one agreeable half-hour in all that dismal day.

"I may be dining with Vera next week, and it will be only kind to wear mourning," Susan told herself, as she ordered the gown.