“I turned,” she whispered. “I went out of the room. I closed the door behind me—oh, ever so gently. I fled.”
“Fled? Fled? Where to?”
“Up the stairs! To my room.”
“And you rang no bell? You roused no one? You fled to your room! You hid your head under the bedclothes like a child! Come, come, Mademoiselle!”
Hanaud broke off his savage irony to ask,
“And whose voice did you think it was that whispered so clearly, ‘That will do now?’ The stranger’s you spoke of in the library this morning?”
“No, Monsieur,” Ann replied. “I could not tell. With a whisper one voice is like another.”
“But you must have given that voice an owner. To run away and hide—no one would do that.”
“I thought it was Jeanne Baudin’s.”
And Hanaud sat back in his chair again, gazing at the girl with a look in which there was as much horror as incredulity. Jim Frobisher stood behind him ashamed of his very race. Could there be a more transparent subterfuge? If she thought that the nurse Jeanne Baudin was in the bedroom, why did she turn and fly?
“Come, Mademoiselle,” said Hanaud. His voice had suddenly become gentle, almost pleading. “You will not make me believe that.”
Ann Upcott turned with a helpless gesture towards Betty.
“You see!” she said.
“Yes,” Betty answered. She sat in doubt for a second or two and then sprang to her feet.
“Wait!” she said, and before anyone could have stopped her she was skimming halfway across the garden to the house. Jim Frobisher wondered whether Hanaud had meant to stop her and then had given up the idea as quite out of the question. Certainly he had made some small quick movement; and even now, he watched Betty’s flight across the broad lawn between the roses with an inscrutable queer look.
“To run like that!” he said to Frobisher, “with a boy’s nimbleness and a girl’s grace! It is pretty, eh? The long slim legs that twinkle, the body that floats!” and Betty ran up the stone steps into the house.
There was a tension in Hanaud’s attitude with which his light words did not agree, and he watched the blank windows of the house with expectancy. Betty, however, was hardly a minute upon her errand. She reappeared upon the steps with a largish envelope in her hand and quickly rejoined the group.
“Monsieur, we have tried to keep this back from you,” she said, without bitterness but with a deep regret. “I yesterday, Ann today, just as we have tried for many years to keep it from all Dijon. But there is no help for it now.”
She opened the envelope and, taking out a cabinet photograph, handed it to Hanaud.
“This is the portrait of Madame, my aunt, at the time of her marriage with my uncle.”
It was the three-quarter length portrait of a woman, slender with the straight carriage of youth, in whose face a look of character had replaced youth’s prettiness. It was a face made spiritual by suffering, the eyes shadowed and wistful, the mouth tender, and conveying even in the hard medium of a photograph some whimsical sense of humour. It made Jim Frobisher, gazing over Hanaud’s shoulder, exclaim not “She was beautiful,” but “I would like to have known her.”
“Yes! A companion,” Hanaud added.
Betty took a second photograph from the envelope.
“But this, Monsieur, is the same lady a year ago.”
The second photograph had been taken at Monte Carlo, and it was difficult to believe that it was of the same woman, so tragic a change had taken place within those ten years. Hanaud held the portraits side by side. The grace, the suggestion of humour had all gone; the figure had grown broad, the features coarse and heavy; the cheeks had fattened, the lips were pendulous; and there was nothing but violence in the eyes. It was a dreadful picture of collapse.
“It is best to be precise, Mademoiselle,” said Hanaud gently, “though these photographs tell their unhappy story clearly enough. Madame Harlowe, during the last years of her life, drank?”
“Since my uncle’s death,” Betty explained. “Her life, as very likely you know already, had been rather miserable and lonely before she married him. But she had a dream then on which to live. After Simon Harlowe died, however—” and she ended her explanation with a gesture.
“Yes,” Hanaud replied, “of course, Mademoiselle, we have known, Monsieur Frobisher and I, ever since we came into this affair that there was some secret. We knew it before your reticence of yesterday or Mademoiselle Upcott’s of today. Waberski must have known of something which you would not care to have exposed before he threatened your lawyers in London, or brought his charges against you.”
“Yes, he knew and the doctors and the servants of course who were very loyal. We did our best to keep our secret but we could never be sure that we had succeeded.”
A friendly smile broadened Hanaud’s face.
“Well, we can make sure now and here,” he said, and both the girls and Jim stared at him.
“How?” they exclaimed in an incredulous voice.
Hanaud beamed. He held them in suspense. He spread out his hands. The artist as he would have said, the mountebank as Jim Frobisher would have expressed it, had got the upper hand in him, and prepared his effect.
“By answering me one simple question,” he said. “Have either of you two ladies received an anonymous letter upon the subject?”
The test took them all by surprise; yet each one of them recognised immediately that they could hardly have a better. All the secrets of the town had been exploited at one time or another by this unknown person or group of persons—all the secrets that is, except this one of Mrs. Harlowe’s degradation. For Betty answered,
“No! I never received one.”
“Nor I,” added Ann.
“Then your secret is your secret still,” said Hanaud.
“For how long now?” Betty asked quickly, and Hanaud did not answer a word. He could make no promise without being false to what he had called his creed.
“It is a pity,” said
