“Good! Quite good!” Anthony approved. “But it won’t do, you know. It won’t do. I repeat, suppose you tell me all about it.”
She essayed escape by another way. She looked up into his face, a light almost tender in her eyes.
“Did you—do you—really mean that about—about serving? Is it true that you want to help me?” she asked. And still her voice was soft; but with how different a softness!
“Most certainly.”
“Then I assure you, Mr. Gethryn, most honestly and sincerely, that you will help me best by—by”—she hovered on the brink of admission—“by not asking me anything, by not trying any more to—to—” She broke down. Her voice died away.
Anthony shook his head. “No. You’re wrong, quite wrong. I’ll show you why. Last night John Hoode was murdered. During the night you swam across the river, crept up to the house, and crouched outside the window of the room in which the murder was done. Why did you do all this? Certainly not for amusement or exercise. Then, unless a coincidence occurred greater than any ever invented by a novelist in difficulties, your visit was in some way connected with the murder. Or, at any rate, some of the circumstances of the murder are known to you.”
“No! No!” Lucia shrank back into her chair.
“There you are, you see.” Anthony made a gesture. “I was putting the point of view of the police and public—what they would say if they knew—not giving my own opinion.
“The sleuthhounds of fiction,” he went on, “are divinely impartial. The minions of Scotland Yard are instructed to be. But I, madam, am that rarissima avis, a prejudiced detective. Ever since this case began I’ve been prejudiced. I’ve been picking up new prejudices at every corner. And the strongest, healthiest, and most unshakable prejudice of them all is the one in favour of you. Now, suppose you tell me all about it.”
“I—I don’t understand,” she murmured, and looked up at him wide-eyed. “You’re so—so bewildering!”
“I’ll go further, then. If I say that even if you killed Hoode and tell me so, I won’t move in any way except to help you, will—you—tell—me—all—about—it?”
Those eyes blazed at him. “Do you dare to suggest that I—”
“Oh, woman, Illogicality should be thy name,” Anthony groaned. “I was merely endeavouring, madam, to show how safe you’d be in telling me all that you know. Listen. I’m in this business privately. I oblige a friend. If I don’t like my own conclusions, I shall say nothing about them. I seek neither Fame nor Honorarium. I have, thank God, more money than is good for me.” He was silent for a moment, and then added: “Now, suppose you tell me all about it.”
She half rose, then sank back into her chair. Her eyes were full on his. For a moment that seemed an hour he lost consciousness of all else. He saw nothing, felt nothing, but those dark twin pools and the little golden lights that danced deep down in the darkness.
“I believe you,” she said at last. “I will tell you”—she laughed a little—“all about it.”
Anthony bowed. “May I sit?” he asked.
“Oh! Please, please forgive me!” She sprang to her feet. “You look so tired—and I’ve kept you standing all this time. And while I’ve been so melodramatic, too. Is there anything you—”
“Only your story.” Anthony had discovered a need to keep a hold upon himself. Contrition had made her, impossibly, yet more beautiful. He pulled up a chair and sat facing her.
The white hands twisted in her lap. She began: “I—I hardly know where to begin. It’s all so—it doesn’t seem real, only it’s too dreadful to be anything else—”
“Why did you go to Abbotshall last night? And why, in Heaven’s name, since you did go there, did you choose to swim?” Anthony conceived that questions would help.
“There wasn’t time to do anything else,” she said, seeming to gather confidence. She went on, the words tumbling over each other: “We’d been out all day—Dora and I and some friends. I—when we got back—Dora and I—there was only just time to change for dinner. As I came in I saw some letters in the hall, and remembered I’d not read them in the morning—we’d been in such a hurry to start. Then I went and forgot them again till after dinner.
“It wasn’t till after half-past ten that I thought of them. And then, when—when I read the one from Jimmy, I—I—oh, God!—” She covered her face with her hands.
“Who,” said Anthony sharply, “is Jimmy?”
With an effort so great that it hurt him to watch, she recovered. The hands dropped to her lap again. He saw the long fingers twist about each other.
“Jimmy,” she said, “is my brother. I’m most awfully fond of him, you know. He is such a darling! Only—only he’s not been quite the same since he got back from Germany. He—he’s ill—and he’s—he’s been d-drinking—and—he was a prisoner there for three years! When they got him he was wounded in the head and they never even—the beasts! The beasts! Oh, Jim, darling—”
“That letter, madam,” Anthony was firm.
“Yes—yes, the letter.” She choked back a sob.
“I—I read it. I read it, and I thought I should go mad! He said he was going—going to sh-shoot Hoode—that night!”
“Your brother? What had he to do with Hoode?” Anthony was at once relieved and bewildered. He knew why she had said, ‘Who shot him?’ But why should Brother want to shoot?
She seemed not to have heard his question. “I tried hard—ever so hard—to persuade myself that the letter was all nonsense, that it was a practical joke, or that Jimmy was ill or—or anything. But I couldn’t. He—he was so precise. The train he was coming by—and everything. The—”
“What had your brother to do with Hoode?” Anthony interrupted. He felt that unless she were kept severely to the point her self-control would vanish altogether.
“He was his secretary
