Some days later the usual verdict was returned--“Suicide whilst temporarily insane,” and within a fortnight the tragedy had been virtually forgotten. By all except one or two people. Captain Charles Preston remembered it; so did Cora Hartsilver, and so did Yootha Hagerston. And the reason they remembered it was this. Lord Froissart died quite a rich man. His sole heir ought by rights to have been his daughter, Mrs. Ferdinand-Westrup. Instead, the bulk of his fortune and property were left to an individual of whom nobody, apparently, had ever heard--a Mrs. Timothy Macmahon, described as the widow of Timothy Macmahon of Cashel, Co. Tipperary, and the will, which was not yet proved, had been executed on the morning of the very day of the tragedy, at the offices of Messrs. Eton, West and Shrubsole, solicitors, of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Now those solicitors, as Preston happened to have heard from his servant, whose brother was a clerk in Eton, West and Shrubsole’s office, were solicitors also to Jessica Mervyn-Robertson. A coincidence, perhaps, as Preston said to Cora Hartsilver a day or two after Froissart’s death, yet in his opinion a curious coincidence. And when, ten days later, Hopford succeeded in obtaining an interview with Cora Hartsilver, and told her of his interview with Aloysius Stapleton, and what Stapleton had tried to induce him to hint at in the newspaper--feeling it his duty to tell her, he had no hesitation in breaking faith with Stapleton--events in the life of Aloysius Stapleton began to look peculiar. But still Stapleton and his intimate friends, Archie La Planta and Jessica Mervyn-Robertson, were to be met everywhere. Still their movements were chronicled almost daily in the social columns of the London press, while their portraits appeared frequently in the weekly periodicals. But perhaps nowhere was Jessica so much noticed as at Ascot. The daily and the weekly papers had apparently laid themselves out to give her as much publicity there as possible. She was seen in her car arriving on the course, accompanied by half a dozen friends, among them of course Stapleton and La Planta. She was seen walking on the course; she was seen in the paddock congratulating the owner of the winner of the Gold Cup; she was seen smiling at a duchess and shaking hands with a peer; she was seen conversing with a foreign premier. Then the fashion papers “featured” her costumes--the gown she wore on the first day of the meeting, on the second day, and so on; the gowns she wore on different nights at the opera; the gowns she wore at Hurlingham, at Ranelagh, at the Military Tournament at Olympia, at the Richmond Show, on her houseboat above Henley until at last even her friends began seriously to ask one another who this woman was who, coming from nowhere, and unknown, had thus conquered London Society by her charm, her personality, and her beauty, but most of all, perhaps, by her lavish display and her extravagance.