Up to eighteen months ago she had lived with her mother, a widow, in Dorsetshire, a few miles behind Weymouth. The pair of them lived with difficulty. For Mrs. Upcott found herself in as desperate a position as England provides for gentlewomen. She was a small landowner taxed up to her ears, and then rated over the top of her head. Ann for her part was thought in the neighbourhood to have promise as an artist. On the death of her mother the estate was sold as a toy to a manufacturer, and Ann with a small purse and a sack-load of ambitions set out for London.
“It took me a year to understand that I was and should remain an amateur. I counted over my money. I had three hundred pounds left. What was I going to do with it? It wasn’t enough to set me up in a shop. On the other hand, I hated the idea of dependence. So I made up my mind to have ten wild gorgeous days at Monte Carlo and make a fortune, or lose the lot.”
It was then that the smile set her eyes dancing.
“I should do the same again,” she cried quite unrepentantly. “I had never been out of England in my life, but I knew a good deal of schoolgirl’s French. I bought a few frocks and hats and off I went. I had the most glorious time. I was nineteen. Everything from the sleeping-cars to the croupiers enchanted me. I stayed at one of the smaller hotels up the hill. I met one or two people whom I knew and they introduced me into the Sporting Club. Oh, and lots and lots of people wanted to be kind to me!” she cried.
“That is thoroughly intelligible,” said Hanaud dryly.
“Oh, but quite nice people too,” Ann rejoined. Her face was glowing with the recollections of that short joyous time. She had forgotten, for the moment, altogether the predicament in which she stood, or she was acting with an artfulness which Hanaud could hardly have seen surpassed in all his experience of criminals.
“There was a croupier, for instance, at the trente-et-quarante table in the big room of the Sporting Club. I always tried to sit next to him. For he saw that no one stole my money and that when I was winning I insured my stake and clawed a little off the heap from time to time. I was there for five weeks and I had made four hundred pounds—and then came three dreadful nights and I lost everything except thirty pounds which I had stowed away in the hotel safe.” She nodded across the hall towards Jim. “Monsieur Frobisher can tell you about the last night. For he sat beside me and very prettily tried to make me a present of a thousand francs.”
Hanaud, however, was not to be diverted.
“Afterwards he shall tell me,” he said, and resumed his questions. “You had met Waberski before that night?”
“Yes, a fortnight before. But I can’t remember who introduced me.”
“And Mademoiselle Harlowe?”
“Monsieur Boris introduced me a day or two later to Betty at teatime in the lounge of the Hôtel de Paris.”
“Aha!” said Hanaud. He glanced at Jim with an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. It was, indeed, becoming more and more obvious that Waberski had brought Ann Upcott into that household deliberately, as part of a plan carefully conceived and in due time to be fulfilled.
“When did Waberski first suggest that you should join Mademoiselle Harlowe?” he asked.
“That last night,” Ann replied. “He had been standing opposite to me on the other side of the trente-et-quarante table. He saw that I had been losing.”
“Yes,” said Hanaud, nodding his head. “He thought that the opportune moment had come.”
He extended his arms and let his hands fall against his thighs. He was like a doctor presented with a hopeless case. He turned half aside from Ann with his shoulders bent and his troubled eyes fixed upon the marble squares of the floor. Jim could not but believe that he was at this moment debating whether he should take the girl into custody. But Betty intervened.
“You must not be misled, Monsieur Hanaud,” she said quickly, “It is true no doubt that Monsieur Boris mentioned the subject to Ann for the first time that night. But I had already told both my aunt and Monsieur Boris that I should like a friend of my own age to live with me and I had mentioned Ann.”
Hanaud looked up at her doubtfully.
“On so short an acquaintance, Mademoiselle?”
Betty, however, stuck to her guns.
“Yes. I liked her very much from the beginning. She was alone. It was quite clear that she was of our own world. There was every good reason why I should wish for her. And the four months she has been with me have proved to me that I was right.”
She crossed over to Ann with a defiant little nod at Hanaud, who responded with a cordial grin and dropped into English.
“So I can push that into my pipe and puff it, as my dear Ricardo would say. That is what you mean? Well, against loyalty, the whole world is powerless.” As he made Betty a friendly bow. He could hardly have told Betty in plainer phrase that her intervention had averted Ann’s arrest; or Ann herself that he believed her guilty.
Everyone in the hall understood him in that sense. They stood foolishly looking here and looking there and not knowing where to look; and in the midst of their discomfort occurred an incongruous little incident which added a
