The note had been from her mother. It was half illiterate invective, half threatening rebuke. Its writer waited outside and demanded to see her. "If you don't come," the ill-shaped writing ran, "I will come to you." Claire knew that this thing had been Mrs. Lee's work as well as if a thousand witnesses had averred it. The missive contained no mention of Mrs. Lee, but she nevertheless had her certainty. 'I must go,' she told herself. 'I must go and meet her. _Can_ I go? Can I walk, feeling as I do? Should I not fall if I tried?' She always afterward remembered the food that her fork now touched and trifled with. It was a sweetbread croquette, with little black specks of chopped truffle in its creamy yielding oval, and the air that they were playing out in the hall was from a light, valueless opera, then much in vogue. She always afterward remembered that, too. So do slight events often press themselves in upon the dazed and dilated vision of a great distress. 'Can I rise and walk?' she kept thinking. 'Should I not fall if I tried?' XXI. It is doubtful if any guest save Mrs. Diggs and one other had seen Claire either receive, open, or read her note. The constant movements of servants hither and thither, and the little conversational cliques formed among the ladies at this central stage of the entertainment, would have made such an escape from general notice both natural and probable. But Mrs. Diggs, who had thus far kept a furtive though incessant watch upon Mrs. Lee, soon felt certain that her cousin had not merely seen what had passed; she was visibly affected by it as well; she could not help regarding Claire across the considerable space which intervened between them. Her expression was a most imprudent betrayal; it clearly told, by its acerbity and exultance, that she held the present occasion to be one of prodigious and triumphant import. No one except Mrs. Diggs was watching her, and she was unaware of even that sidelong but intent gaze. The natural mobility of her odd face, which repelled some and attracted others, needed at all times a certain check; but chagrins or satisfactions were both readily imprinted there. It corresponded to the pliability of her body; it would have been a face in which some clever actress might have found a fortune. She usually restrained it with discretion, but just now the force of a malign joy swept aside prudent control. Before Mrs. Diggs's exploring search of it ended, her last doubt had fled. 'I never saw her look more like the snake that she is,' Claire's friend had thought. 'The mischief--the deviltry, it may be--lies in that letter. Claire has grown as white as its paper; but nobody notices, thank Heaven! She won't faint--she isn't of the fainting sort.' "Claire," she now said aloud, yet in tones which the most adroit of eavesdroppers could not have more than just vaguely overheard, "did you get any bad news a minute ago?"