"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!" CHAPTER XVIII When Joan awoke after a few hours’ slumber, it was to a sense of racking headache and utter exhaustion. She could only vaguely feel, rather than remember, the crucial events of the previous night.