“I ought to have held my tongue—if mother ever came to know! But I was quite right, Joseph Buquet had no business to talk of things that don’t concern him—it will bring him bad luck—mother was saying so last night—”
There was a sound of hurried and heavy footsteps in the passage and a breathless voice cried:
“Cecile! Cecile! Are you there?”
“It’s mother’s voice,” said Jammes. “What’s the matter?”
She opened the door.
A respectable lady, built on the lines of a Pomeranian grenadier, burst into the dressing-room and dropped groaning into a vacant armchair.
Her eyes rolled madly in her brick-dust colored face.
“How awful!” she said. “How awful!”
“What? What?”
“Joseph Buquet—”
“What about him?”
“Joseph Buquet is dead!”
The room became filled with exclamations, with astonished outcries, with scared requests for explanations.
“Yes, he was found hanging in the third-floor cellar!”
“It’s the ghost!” little Giry blurted, as though in spite of herself; but she at once corrected herself, with her hands pressed to her mouth: “No, no!—I didn’t say it!—I didn’t say it!—”