While she wondered, and put this question to herself, and glanced at the hard, dry, leathern face wreathed at the moment in perfunctory smiles, there came to Audrey suddenly a knowledge of the truth. For in the Frenchwoman’s cold eyes, straight mouth and well-shaped nose, and even more in the quick glance she threw, penetrating, intelligent, malignant, at her nominal chief, Audrey recognised that hitherto unsuspected likeness to Mr. Candover which confirmed part of the story told by her mysterious black-robed visitor. And Audrey knew that in Mademoiselle Marie Laure, the Frenchwoman who “couldn’t speak English,” she had to deal with the half-sister of Mr. Candover, the woman of whom she had been told that “she was as wicked and heartless as he was himself.” CHAPTER XVIII It was inevitable that such a scene as that which had passed in Madame Rocada’s showrooms, should become matter of common gossip within a few hours. The story reached the clubs before the afternoon was over, and on every hand it was discussed, with variations of all sorts, until poor Audrey herself would hardly have recognised either her own portrait or the details of the miserable affair. Sir Harry Archdale, who had walked away with Mr. Candover, and who found an opportunity of expressing his admiration for Miss Pamela, even while he regretted having met her in the society of Madame Rocada, detailed his version of the occurrence to the young Angmerings, and they, after hearing various other accounts of it, went back next morning to their father’s place in Hampshire, for the very purpose of enlightening both Lord Clanfield and their cousin concerning an event which touched the family honour nearly. Both Edgar and his brother Geoffrey had shared the general suspicions of Madame Rocada’s good faith, and had alternately chuckled and waxed indignant over the story that she was their cousin’s wife, at one moment believing it and pitying Gerard, at another laughing at it as an invention, or growing angry at the notion. Now, however, the aspect of affairs had changed. Sir Harry had told them of what Mr. Candover had said, that Madame Rocada, the artful keeper of a shady gambling-house, was the wife of a convict. And this statement, chiming in with Audrey’s own confession that she was their cousin’s wife, made them feel the necessity of communicating with their father, who would deal with the matter as he might think fit. It was an awful scandal to have a cousin under their roof who, whether guilty or innocent, had undoubtedly been convicted of forgery; it was a worse thing for it to become known that this cousin’s wife was a woman in whose house men were fleeced of their money. It was luncheon-time when they arrived at the old red-brick mansion, where they found their cousin Gerard, as usual, in the garden, looking ill indeed, but a little less thin, a little less lifeless, than he had been a week before.