Hurriedly withdrawing, therefore, without speaking a word, Audrey went out upon the staircase, and into her own private room, where she kept her walking dress. Changing quickly into this, she had just put on her hat, with the intention of going downstairs to meet Mademoiselle Laure on her return and to consult with her as to what she had better do, when she was startled by the sound of the unlocking of a door, and then by footsteps running rapidly down the stairs. She flew to the door and looked out; but she was too late to see more than this: that the person who was dashing down the stairs and disappearing by the side door into the street was a man. Who was it? And why was not the white-clad lady with him? Audrey hesitated only one moment, and then, full of fears she could not have defined, ran up to the fitting-room and went in. The room was quite dark, but she touched the electric button, and at once a flood of soft light filled the apartment. A cry of horror broke from her lips when, turning her eyes at once towards a big divan which stood under the window, she saw lying at full length upon it the body of the woman in the white dress. Her white hat was crushed and bent under her poor lifeless head; one hand, still in its long wrinkled white kid glove, was outstretched as if in a last convulsion; one white kid, high-heeled walking shoe lay on the floor. The white ostrich feather boa which had floated round her shoulders when Audrey saw her alive was twisted round her thin throat. The clinging white dress was bound round her motionless limbs. And over all, dress, gloves, boa, in startling and awful contrast to the white clothes, were marks of blood: blood which had gushed out from her mouth and streamed over everything. Audrey was aghast. Was this a murdered woman upon whose body she was looking? She could not tell. For the haggard cheeks, the glassy eyes, the laboured breath, the feeble though passionate movements, all of which signs she had noticed in the living woman, the husky voice, the occasional cough, had betrayed unmistakably the fact that the poor woman was in the last stage of consumption, and her death might well have resulted from the bursting of a blood-vessel in a moment of wild excitement. On the other hand, the sudden disappearance of the man who had met her and dragged her away from the doorway was horribly suggestive. And the feather boa which appeared to be bound round the poor woman’s thin and wasted throat might, Audrey thought with horror, have been the means of her death.