“No. There is a passage at the end of the house under the reception-rooms from the courtyard which the gardeners use. The only other entrance is through the hall behind us. This old house was built in days when your house really was your castle and the fewer the entrances, the more safely you slept.”
The clocks of that city of Clocks clashed out the hour of eleven, throwing the sounds of their strokes backwards and forwards above the pinnacles and rooftops in a sort of rivalry. Betty rose to her feet.
“There’s a day gone, at all events,” she said, and Ann Upcott agreed with a breath of relief. To Jim it seemed a pitiful thing that these two girls, to whom each day should be a succession of sparkling hours all too short, must be rejoicing quietly, almost gratefully, that another of them had passed.
“It should be the last of the bad days,” he said, and Betty turned swiftly towards him, her great eyes shining in the darkness.
“Good night, Jim,” she said, her voice ever so slightly lingering like a caress upon his name and she held out her hand. “It’s terribly dull for you, but we are not unselfish enough to let you go. You see, we are shunned just now—oh, it’s natural! To have you with us means a great deal. For one thing,” and there came a little lilt in her voice, “I shall sleep tonight.” She ran up the steps and stood for a moment against the light from the hall. “A long-legged slip of a girl, in black silk stockings”—thus Mr. Haslitt had spoken of her as she was five years ago, and the description fitted her still.
“Good night, Betty,” said Jim, and Ann Upcott ran past him up the steps and waved her hand.
“Good night,” said Jim, and with a little twist of her shoulders Ann followed Betty. She came back, however. She was wearing a little white frock of crêpe de Chine with white stockings and satin shoes, and she gleamed at the head of the steps like a slender thing of silver.
“You’ll bolt the door when you come in, won’t you?” She pleaded with a curious anxiety considering the height of the strong walls about the garden.
“I will,” said Jim, and he wondered why in all this business Ann Upcott stood out as a note of fear. It was high time indeed, that the long line of windows was thrown open and the interdict raised from the house and its inmates. Jim Frobisher paced the quiet garden in the darkness with a prayer at his heart that that time would come tomorrow. In Betty’s room above the reception-rooms the light was still burning behind the latticed shutters of the windows, in spite of her confidence that she would sleep—yes, and in Ann Upcott’s room too, at the end of the house towards the street. A fury against Boris Waberski flamed up in him.
It was late before he himself went into the house and barred the door, later still before he fell asleep. But once asleep, he slept soundly, and when he waked, it was to find his shutters thrown wide to the sunlight, his coffee cold by his bedside, and Gaston, the old servant, in the room.
“Monsieur Hanaud asked me to tell you he was in the library,” he said.
Jim was out of bed in an instant.
“Already? What is the time, Gaston?”
“Nine o’clock. I have prepared Monsieur’s bath.” He removed the tray from the table by the bed. “I will bring some fresh coffee.”
“Thank you! And will you please tell Monsieur Hanaud that I will not be long.”
“Certainly, Monsieur.”
Jim took his coffee while he dressed and hurried down to the library, where he found Hanaud seated at the big writing-table in the middle of the room, with a newspaper spread out over the blotting-pad and placidly reading the news. He spoke quickly enough, however, the moment Jim appeared.
“So you left your hotel in the Place Darcy, after all, eh, my friend? The exquisite Miss Upcott! She had but to sigh out a little prayer and clasp her hands together, and it was done. Yes, I saw it all from the hall. What it is to be young! You have those two letters which Waberski wrote your firm?”
“Yes,” said Jim. He did not think it necessary to explain that though the prayer was Ann Upcott’s, it was the thought of Betty which had brought him to the Maison Grenelle.
“Good! I have sent for him,” said Hanaud.
“To come to this house?”
“I am expecting him now.”
“That’s capital,” cried Jim. “I shall meet him, then! The damned rogue! I shouldn’t wonder if I thumped him,” and he clenched his fist and shook it in a joyous anticipation.
“I doubt if that would be so helpful as you think. No, I beg of you to place yourself in my hands this morning, Monsieur Frobisher,” Hanaud interposed soberly. “If you confront Waberski at once with those two letters, at once his accusation breaks down. He will withdraw it. He will excuse himself. He will burst into a torrent of complaints and reproaches. And I shall get nothing out of him. That I do not want.”
“But what is there to be got?” Jim asked impatiently.
“Something perhaps. Perhaps nothing,” the detective returned with a shrug of the shoulders. “I have a second mission in Dijon, as I told you in Paris.”
“The anonymous letters?”
“Yes. You were present yesterday when Mademoiselle Harlowe told me how she learned that I was summoned from Paris upon this case. It was not, after all, any of my colleagues here who spread the news. It is even now unknown that I am here. No, it was the writer of the letters. And in so difficult a matter I can afford to neglect no clue. Did Waberski know that I was going to be sent for? Did he hear that at the Prefecture when he lodged his charge on the Saturday or from
