So she prayed, but not to the fetish. In this uplifted moment Leah felt that Lionel's Deity was not a myth, but a terrible reality. CHAPTER XXIX Then did "Rumour, painted full of tongues," enter into Lady Jim's strictly private life and depart with half-truths for the bewildering of gossips. In some marvellous way the news leaked out, as news will, despite careful caulking of the human vessels containing it. Lord James Kaimes, ran the babble, had been kidnapped by his medical attendant, who, substituting an illegal corpse for that of the husband he wished to supplant, had plotted to secure the wife. This was the tune, correct enough; then came its variations. The hurdy-gurdy of society ground out wonderful twiddles and twists of false notes, distorting the original theme into a melody Leah herself would not have recognised. Not that she heard any of the _fiortura_. Prudence counselled a retreat to Firmingham pending the home-coming of Jim, and thither, very wisely, she went. At this crisis of her fortunes Lady Jim felt that she required the countenance of all truly respectable people, however dull, and therefore sheltered like a maltreated chick under Hilda Frith's wing. To console the widowed and orphaned was her obvious excuse,--so obvious, indeed, that she declined to make it. Thus did she escape questions about the one engrossing topic of drawing-room, club, and public-house bar. Every one, from the lowest to the highest, talked exhaustively, and the newspapers, cheap and costly, printed scandal with alluring recklessness. Out of London E.C. issued halfpenny journals with lurid headings over incomplete histories of the plot, invented on unsound premises. These transparent fictions began with the Russian's snake-in-the-grass intrusion into the happy home of an attached couple, and ended with a political cry for the exclusion of such immoral aliens from the Island of the Blest, which is England. The more expensive small-beer chronicles refused to believe that so fantastic an occurrence could have happened in these enlightened days of police-courts and publicity; but, nevertheless, supplied middle-class breakfast-tables with equally doubtful data, out of which to weave romances of the minor peerage. "The triangle of Dumas the younger," cried one scribe, with a fine disregard for meaning and metaphor, "must never be sounded in our dear Motherland!" A sufficient sample this of the stuff supplied. But, since the silly season prevailed when reporters, one and all, were credited with March-hare madness, such incongruities were pardoned, and the public gaped to swallow full-sized camels.