It was a curious scene, a scene to remember long afterwards. In all Lawrence's imaginative writing he had never constructed anything more striking than this. He was about to hear the story of a strange crime, and it could not be told in a better setting than the Corner House.
The garish sunlight struggled through the grimy panes. Under ordinary conditions the drawing-room was a luxurious one. But the fine dust of years had settled upon pictures and statues and upon the upholstery of the old Empire furniture. As Charlton paced to and fro a gossamer cloud of dust seemed to follow him.
In the centre of it all sat Leona. Lawrence could see now that there were marks and bruises on her face, the result of the autocar accident, which showed out now there was no artist to attend to them.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap grimly, patiently waiting for the novelist to speak. He produced a cigarette.
"You won't mind?" he said.
"I will have one with you," Leona replied. "That will be more comfortable. Now, will you be so good as to proceed?"
"We will go back to the beginning," Lawrence began. "Here is a very beautiful and fascinating woman, living all alone in her wealth. Her talents and her loveliness have taken her into the cream of society."
"Which isn't worth the trouble when you've got it."
"There I perfectly agree with you. But the lady I speak of is bound to lead. Wherever she is and whatever walk of life she finds herself in, she is bound to lead. She flashes out and dazzles London. She lives in a fine house and entertains royally. But there is one thing that puzzles me. Why does the lady reside so far from Park Lane or Belgravia or Mayfair?"
"Lytton Avenue houses are large and they have gardens."
Lawrence smiled as he flicked off the end of his cigarette.
"It is very good of you to assist me in my deductions," he said. "But that does not quite account for everything; in fact, it accounts for nothing. There are finer houses in the localities I speak of, with better gardens. And a lady who pays for nothing has no need to study economy."
Leona laughed outright.
"I have paid for nothing for years," she said. "L'audace, l'audace et toujours l'audace! But for circumstances over which I had no control I might have gone on to my death. But proceed. I am interested."
"Let us hope the story will proceed in grip as it proceeds," Lawrence murmured. "I was interested too. This, I say in effect to myself, is a splendid woman in a halo of mystery. I must study her with a view to a future heroine. I see her in the park where I can study her features. After a time I come to the conclusion that I have taken up a magnificent adventuress."
"Never a truer word in your life," Leona sneered.
"Well, I am glad not to have offended you. Incidentally I am not the less interested because my young relative Hetty Lawrence holds a position of some trust in the house of the heroine of the story. I say to myself that I must know the Countess Lalage. We become quite friends, in fact."
Leona smiled in a queer, strange way.
"Oh, yes," she said slowly. "We were friends. I bear you no malice. But if I had only guessed--well, we should have seen something fresh in the way of obituary notices."
"You would have removed me," Lawrence asked.
"Ay, I should. I should have put you from my path. Make no mistake about that. But it is no use repining over that. Go on."
"Well, I study you. Then I begin to see my way. It was only the kind of idea that would creep into the brain of a novelist who does not scruple to endow even his most intimate friends with ferocious qualities for business purposes. But I allowed myself to think that the reason why you had come to Lytton Avenue was because you were in some way interested in the Corner House. There you have the first faint indication of the shaping of the story.
"Here in the dull and gloomy Corner House, with its dark and gloomy tragedy, cheek by jowl with the hardness and glitter and brilliancy of Lytton Avenue. If my adventurer wants a big dark cupboard to hide things, where can she have a better one than the Corner House! If I bore you----"
"Bore me!" Leona cried. "Never more interested in my life. Subtlety of this kind always appeals to me. Proceed."
"Again, it is a little strange that I have already built a romance round the Corner House before the heroine came along. I told you once that I had known the owner of the Corner House before the tragedy. I had my heroine and I had my plot. A plot of vengeance and wounded pride.
"But stranger still to say, the live heroine, yourself, is more deeply interested than I imagined. We will say that she did a foolish thing. She fell in love with one of her own guests--Dr. Bruce, to be plain."
Leona quivered but said nothing. It was only by a motion of her hand that she signalled Lawrence to proceed.
"Well, this love came--the wild, unreasoning passion of the South. Dr. Bruce was pushed on, his fortune was being rapidly made. Then my heroine makes a discovery in strict accordance with the conditions of the game. Her governess and the doctor are affianced to one another."
"It is always thus in books," Leona said, with a hard smile.
"Inevitably. But you were not in a book, unfortunately. You were flesh and blood and you took your own way. You thought you had been slighted. You made up your mind to get your revenge at any price. All the same, you could not see your way. You wanted a neat plot to get Bruce into trouble, for he had bad taste in not caring for you. You used the simple expedient of stealing mine."