“Calm yourself, Mademoiselle,” Hanaud returned gently. “No advantage will be taken of you. I am going to break no seals. That, as I have told you, is the right of the Commissaire, who is a magistrate, and he will not move until the medical analysis is ready. No, what I was going to propose was that Mademoiselle here,” and he pointed to Ann, “should show me the outside of those reception-rooms and the rest of the house.”
“Of course,” said Betty, and she sat down again in the window-seat.
“Thank you,” said Hanaud. He turned back to Ann Upcott. “Shall we go? And as we go, will you tell me what you think of Boris Waberski?”
“He has some nerve. I can tell you that, Monsieur Hanaud,” Ann cried. “He actually came back to this house after he had lodged his charge, and asked me to support him”; and she passed out of the room in front of Hanaud.
Jim Frobisher followed the couple to the door and closed it behind them. The last few minutes had set his mind altogether at rest. The author of the anonymous letters was the detective’s real quarry. His manner had quite changed when putting his questions about them. The flamboyancies and the indifference, even his amusement at Betty’s ill-humour had quite disappeared. He had got to business watchfully, quietly. Jim came back into the room. He took his cigarette-case from his pocket and opened it.
“May I smoke?” he asked. As he turned to Betty for permission, a fresh shock brought his thoughts and words alike to a standstill. She was staring at him with panic naked in her eyes and her face set like a tragic mask.
“He believes me guilty,” she whispered.
“No,” said Jim, and he went to her side. But she would not listen.
“He does. I am sure of it. Don’t you see that he was bound to? He was sent from Paris. He has his reputation to think of. He must have his victim before he returns.”
Jim was sorely tempted to break his word. He had only to tell the real cause which had fetched Hanaud out of Paris and Betty’s distress was gone. But he could not. Every tradition of his life strove to keep him silent. He dared not even tell her that this charge against her was only an excuse. She must live in anxiety for a little while longer. He laid his hand gently upon her shoulder.
“Betty, don’t believe that!” he said, with a consciousness of how weak that phrase was compared with the statement he could have made. “I was watching Hanaud, listening to him. I am sure that he already knew the answers to the questions he was asking you. Why, he even knew that Simon Harlowe had a passion for collecting, though not a word had been said of it. He was asking questions to see how you would answer them, setting now and then a little trap, as he admitted—”
“Yes,” said Betty in trembling voice, “all the time he was setting traps.”
“And every answer that you gave, even your manner in giving them,” Jim continued stoutly, “more and more made clear your innocence.”
“To him?” asked Betty.
“Yes, to him. I am sure of it.”
Betty Harlowe caught at his arm and held it in both her hands. She leaned her head against it. Through the sleeve of his coat he felt the velvet of her cheek.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, Jim,” and as she pronounced the name she smiled. She was thanking him not so much for the stout confidence of his words, as for the comfort which the touch of him gave to her.
“Very likely I am making too much of little things,” she went on. “Very likely I am ungenerous, too, to Monsieur Hanaud. But he lives amidst crimes and criminals. He must be so used to seeing people condemned and passing out of sight into blackness and horrors, that one more or less, whether innocent or guilty, going that way, wouldn’t seem to matter very much.”
“Yes, Betty, I think that is a little unjust,” Jim Frobisher remarked gently.
“Very well, I take it back,” she said, and she let his arm go. “All the same, Jim, I am looking to you, not to him,” and she laughed with an appealing tremor in the laugh which took his heart by storm.
“Luckily,” said he, “you don’t have to look to anyone,” and he had hardly finished the sentence before Ann Upcott came back alone into the room. She was about Betty’s height and Betty’s age and had the same sort of boyish slenderness and carriage which marks the girls of this generation. But in other respects, even to the colour of her clothes, she was as dissimilar as one girl can be from another. She was dressed in white from her coat to her shoes, and she wore a big gold hat so that one was almost at a loss to know where her hat ended and her hair began.
“And Monsieur Hanaud?” Betty asked.
“He is prowling about by himself,” she replied. “I showed him all the rooms and who used them, and he said that he would have a look at them and sent me back to you.”
“Did he break the seals on the reception-rooms?” Betty Harlowe asked.
“Oh, no,” said Ann. “Why, he told us that he couldn’t do that without the Commissaire.”
“Yes, he told us that,” Betty remarked dryly. “But I was wondering whether he meant what he told us.”
“Oh, I don’t think Monsieur Hanaud’s alarming,” said Ann. She gave Jim Frobisher the impression that at any moment she might call him a dear old thing. She had quite got over the first little shock which the announcement of his presence had caused her. “Besides,” and she sat down by the side of Betty in the window-seat and looked with the frankest confidence at Jim—“besides, we can feel safe now, anyway.”
Jim
