"No appetite. But if you'll come along to the Cecil----" "Certainly not. We've been there much too often of late. People will talk." "Let them! What does it matter?" "Everything matters, when people have tongues and eyes, and envious natures. Don't be silly. I promised the Duke to stop here for half an hour. And after all, it's amusing. I never knew such people existed outside _Punch_. Well--what now?" This because, with sudden recollection of an oversight, he brought out an envelope. "This was waiting at Curzon Street," he explained, handing it across, "and the butler, thinking it might be important asked me to---- Why, what's the matter, Leah?" It was his turn to inquire, for, reading while he talked, she had suddenly whitened. "Don't call me Leah," she snapped, with the irritation of a shaken woman, then re-read the cablegram, again and again. "What is it?--what is it?" "My husband is--dead!" She crushed the paper into a ball, rose to go, and dropped back, overwhelmingly faint. "Oh!" she moaned faintly. For once in her life of shams and sneering and playing with other-world fires she was moved to genuine emotion. CHAPTER XIX Leah's emotion--as she felt--was almost cruelly genuine. It bore the trademark of sincerity; it made her heart hammer furiously against her ribs, and drove the blood from her cheeks. Yet she knew that Jim still lived; that the lying cablegram was but a necessary card to play for the winning of large stakes. For once, the expected had happened--that was all. Why then should she exhibit emotions which could not possibly have been caused by the excuse offered to the public. Her heart replied with brutal directness, that she had crossed the Old Bailey Rubicon, and was actually participating in a crime. The last word shook her out of cotton-wool wrappings into a naked world. Up to the receipt of the cablegram she could have drawn back. Now, fully committed to the adventure, she was compelled to tread a perilous path. A criminal! Yes: she had been one in intention, which mattered little; she was now criminal in fact, and that meant punishment. Her imagination conjured up visions of the possible. The judge spoke, the prison gaped, the bolts shot home, Curzon Street was exchanged for Wormwood Scrubbs. Ugh! But after all, such queasy thoughts were unnecessary. If she had broken the eighth commandment, she fully intended to keep the eleventh and unwritten one, "Thou shalt not be found out."