CHAPTER XVII

"Merciful Heaven--it can't be that!" mentally exclaimed the unhappy girl. "Why--people will surely be coming in--I shall be found--and he--like that--with the drugged brandy in the bottle--and I shall not even have got my letters out of that desk!"

She silently wrung her hands; then, determined to dare or lose all, she crept slowly, cautiously back, along the hall, up the stairs, and peeped in at the half-opened door.

He was lying almost prone on the sofa--his head thrown back--slowly, slowly snoring.

She stole in and gazed fearfully at him. He looked corpse-like, but she thought he would naturally do that after that dose of morphia. Insensible! Peering into his face, she saw his eyes, filmy, fishy, between the half-closed lids. She touched his breast pocket, cautiously--her heart beating fast and strong. Nothing there but the white handkerchief, arranged in dandified fashion. As she stooped the scent of the flower in his buttonhole turned her deadly sick. All seemed to surge around.

"This won't do!" she told herself, wildly. Then, with a violent effort, she lifted the hand that lay limply upon his knee across his trouser pocket. It moved easily. She laid it down with a light, almost tender touch, as she remembered she had seen him return his keys to the very pocket where she now saw them bulging, and putting her fingers gingerly into the pocket, she drew them out.

"Thank God!" she murmured, almost hysterically, and, telling herself that if only she could hold witnesses in her hands to that absurd, so-called marriage of him with her, and could dictate terms, every farthing she might inherit from her uncle should be his, and more--she went to the table, found the tiny key in the bunch, and opened the desk.

Just as she was beginning to remove the leather purses of gold she had brought him from the well of the desk, so as to search beneath, a prolonged, curious, hissing snore seemed to arrest her very breath.

She stopped and went to him. The hissing sound was barely over--how curious it was, that half-snore, half breath! He lay still still--still as----

"Oh, no, no! It cannot be that! He looks asleep, and as happy as if he were an innocent little child!" she assured herself, returning to the table and to her task. Out she quickly took them, one by one, those silly purses--how puerile money and all those things seemed, she told herself, at such a moment--and then peered anxiously at the packets of papers.

Eureka! Her girlish handwriting! There was a package--she drew it out, and in the middle projected a paper--she could not undo the knots--there was no time--but she turned down a corner and saw printed letters--a margin----

Seizing her little bag, she thrust them in, and rapidly restoring the purses to their place, locked the desk.

"Shall I put the keys back in his pocket?" she asked herself. "No! I can leave them on the table. It is of no use trying to hide my having taken the letters. He will discover it."

She glanced round the room. What else must she do? She frowned and bit her lip as the brandy bottle caught her eye. There was still remaining a certain quantity of the drugged liquid.

"Any more would certainly make him very ill, if it did not kill him--and he will very likely start drinking again when he wakes up," she mused. "Can I pour it away?" She looked uncertainly at the door. No, it was too hazardous. Then she remembered she had seen some brown paper in that cupboard where the skeleton hung.

Once more she went to the cupboard and took out a crumpled sheet of brown paper, smiling almost derisively at the grinning skull of the hanging skeleton.

"How true you were when you said there were worse things than skeletons," she thought, inwardly apostrophizing the sleeper, as she quickly wrapped the bottle in the paper. Then, mentally wishing him a better and more generous spirit in her regard when he awoke, she ran rapidly downstairs with bag and bottle, and in another moment was in the street.

Her success, her escape, filled her with a joy which made her feel almost delirious. Still, she noticed a hansom with a lady in it drive past, and with an almost contemptuous mental comment--"she cannot be living at Number 12," she looked back over her shoulder, then stopped short, and leaning against the rails, watched.

The hansom did stop at the house she had left. More, the lady alighted--briskly, as if she were as young as she was slim and alert--looked up and down the street, as if, indeed, Joan thought, she, too, had noticed herself, and wondered what she was doing in Haythorn Street at that hour, and then, after paying the driver, ran up the steps and let herself in with her latchkey.

"A lodger," thought Joan. "I wonder if she knows him!" Then she turned and almost fled along the street, for the cabman had turned and waved his whip. To take that cab would be madness! Besides, she meant to lay that bottle quietly in a corner at the very first opportunity.

It came a few moments before she reached Westminster Bridge. She saw a doorway in the shadow, and quick as lightning she had deposited her bottle there and had gone onward. Almost a slight unconsciousness possessed her after that. She hailed a cab, drove to the spot where she had left Julie, and alighted.

"I have been here since eleven, mademoiselle!" exclaimed Julie, coming forward after she saw the cab drive off. She had been confiding in her lover--or rather, Paul Naz, as his friend Victor Mercier's honorary detective, had been worming matters deftly from her--and his advice had been to her to be very, ah, most exceedingly discreet, and the young lady would for her own sake prove their best friend in the future. "It is nearly half-past now--shall I call a cab?"

A crawling hansom was hailed, and before midnight a sleepy man-servant of Sir Thomas admitted them. He was just going to bed, he said, in a drowsy and somewhat injured tone. "I told Sir Thomas and my lady you was in and gone to bed, m'm," he said, almost reproachfully. "They come in half an hour back! I am sure I thought you was, or I shouldn't have said it!"

"It doesn't matter in the least, Robert," Joan cheerfully assured him, and she went to her room with Julie, feeling more elated than she had done since the awful morning four years ago when she had to accept the fact that she was the grass-widow of a blackguard. Julie speedily dismissed, she spent a couple of hours over her letters.

The printed paper was her marriage certificate. The letters were six in number, nearly worn into shreds, and black with dirt. She read them through, she made a note of the dates on the certificate, then she burnt them under her empty grate.

"Once more I am free!" was her last exultant thought before she slept. "If I keep Victor at bay for a few days, I shall be off and away with _him_; and without those documents Victor is practically powerless! If he gets another certificate, Joan Thorne might have been any one--some one married under an assumed name. He has nothing to support his assertions!"