It seemed to Louise that she had scarcely been in bed an hour when the more confidential of her maids--Annette, the Frenchwoman--woke her with a light touch of the arm. She sat up in bed sleepily.
"What is it, Annette?" she asked. "Surely it is not mid-day yet? Why do you disturb me?"
"It is barely nine o'clock, Mademoiselle, but Monsieur Bellamy--Mademoiselle told me that she wished to receive him whenever he came. He is in the boudoir now, and very impatient."
"Did he send any message?"
"Only that his business was of the most urgent," the maid replied.
Louise sighed,--she was really very sleepy. Then, as the thoughts began to crowd into her brain, she began also to remember. Some part of the excitement of a few hours ago returned.
"My bath, Annette, and a dressing-gown," she ordered. "Tell Monsieur Bellamy that I hurry. I will be with him in twenty minutes."
To Bellamy, the twenty minutes were minutes of purgatory. She came at last, however, fresh and eager; her hair tied up with ribbon, she herself clad in a pink dressing-gown and pink slippers.
"David!" she cried,--"my dear David--!"
Then she broke off.
"What is it?" she asked, in a different tone.
He showed her the headlines of the newspaper he was carrying.
"Tragedy!" he answered hoarsely. "Von Behrling was true, after all,--at least, it seems so."
"What has happened?" she demanded.
Bellamy pointed once more to the newspaper.
"He was murdered last night, within fifty yards of the place of our rendezvous."
A little exclamation broke from Louise's lips. She sat down suddenly. The color called into her cheeks by the exercise of her bath was rapidly fading away.
"David," she murmured, "is this true?"
"It is indeed," Bellamy assured her. "Not only that, but there is no mention of his pocket-book in the account of his murder. It must have been engineered by Streuss and the others, and they have got away with the pocket-book and the money."
"What can we do?" she asked.
"There is nothing to be done," Bellamy declared calmly. "We are defeated. The thing is quite apparent. Von Behrling never succeeded, after all, in shaking off the espionage of the men who were watching him. They tracked him to our rendezvous, they waited about while I met him. Afterwards, he had to pass along a narrow passage. It was there that he was found murdered."
"But, David, I don't understand! Why did they wait until after he had seen you? How did they know that he had not parted with the paper in the restaurant? To all intents and purposes he ought to have done so."