Mrs. Beecher Monmouth began to run up the wide carpeted staircase. John noticed that she wore grey shoes with scarlet heels, and that her stockings were of dark red silk to match her dress. She ascended half a dozen steps, then turned, noticing that John had begun to frame an excuse. He wanted to get away before she reached her boudoir, before she could enter her bedroom where her husband awaited her. The meeting between these two which was imminent was not one which John wished to witness. He waved a farewell hand, uttered conventional apologies and made to go.
Mrs. Beecher Monmouth, however, would hear nothing of it. She ran down the stairs, took him by the arm, shook a finger in his face, called him a "bad, cruel boy," and led him upstairs.
Cherriton and von Kuhne closed in behind.
The boudoir was empty when Mrs. Beecher Monmouth entered and switched on the lights. In a swift survey of the apartment John noticed the rifled dispatch-box on a gilt-legged chair where he had left it. Very swiftly and dexterously he whipped off his light overcoat and threw it over the box, hiding it from view.
Mrs. Beecher Monmouth, who wore extensive _décolletée_, with a small tiara glimmering in her perfectly arranged dark tresses, permitted John to relieve her of an opera cloak of grey silk brocade. She stood for a minute displaying herself in perfect consciousness of her striking beauty. Her arms and shoulders, perfectly modelled, were white as marble. There was a challenging light in her brilliant eyes as they sought John's. She was one of those women who look best at night, a flower that bloomed best in artificial light.
John's mind, since their entrance into the room, had not, however, been occupied either with her beauty or his own personal danger.
He was thinking only of a sound he had heard some minutes earlier, at the moment he had drawn open the front door. The sound, like a distant crack of a whip, had reached him from the interior of the house. Only now did that sound gather to itself significance.
Sudden doubts assailed John. In that room behind the closed door Beecher Monmouth had seen his own doting attempts at love mocked and laughed at; he had read the passionate letters of her real lover, Kurt von Morgen. She had betrayed not only her husband but her husband's country.