Against her will, poor Audrey was at last obliged to acknowledge that there was only one person to whom she could make known her difficulty, with any prospect of advice and help. In desperation she wrote a few lines to Mr. Candover, telling him that something so strange had happened at the showrooms that she did not like even to return to them without consulting some one, and asking if he would meet her at an Oxford Street confectioner’s, whose name she gave, at nine o’clock on the following morning. She sent this note by messenger to Mr. Candover’s flat in Victoria Street, and got the answer by the morning’s post:-- “Dear Madame Rocada, “Of course I will be there. I hope it is nothing serious which is troubling you so much. “Yours always, “Reginald Candover.” Audrey frowned when she saw the address. She had taken her rooms in the name of Madame Rocada, “Angmering” being too uncommon a name not to be recognised and commented on. Absolutely sure as she felt of her husband’s innocence of the supposed crime for which he was suffering, Audrey preferred not to be the object of the gossip which would certainly have centred round her if her identity had been known. But she disliked the alias, as she called it, and wished that she had been allowed to take some simpler, less pretentious name than the high-sounding mock-title by which she was now known. Of course, as Mr. Candover said, nobody supposed that the title of “Countess” was anything but a trade fiction, but the whole surroundings of her new calling, combining unlimited show with narrow capital, were distasteful to Audrey. At nine o’clock punctually Mr. Candover met her, and she at once, having ordered coffee and a roll as an excuse for her presence in the shop, told him the whole story of the events of the previous evening. He thrust aside as absurd the suggestion of the Frenchwoman and the doctor that Audrey had been misled by her imagination. “You saw a woman, a stranger, undoubtedly,” said he. “People don’t imagine such things. And no doubt you saw her dragged away, and saw her lying in the fitting-room. The only thing I doubt is that she can have been dead.” “Don’t you think Mademoiselle Laure may have found the dead body and, in her anxiety to hush things up, have removed it?” “No doubt she could. The old Frenchwoman is artful enough for anything, and clever enough too--but to do such a thing, and to remove all traces of such a tragedy, requires time. Now, by your account, she had no time. You say you were only left alone about twenty minutes or half an hour, and that in that time she had fetched a doctor?” “Ye-es, but----” “Well, she might very well have removed the body, but it’s impossible, absolutely impossible, that she could have removed all traces, so as to deceive even the doctor!”