“But it is evident that he does,” cried Betty.
Jim answered slowly:
“I suppose he does. We can make sure, anyway. I had a doubt last night. So I asked him point-blank.”
“And he answered you?” Betty asked with a gasp.
“Yes and no. He gave me the strangest answer.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me to visit the Church of Notre Dame. If I did, I should read upon the façade whether Ann was innocent or not.”
Slowly every tinge of colour ebbed out of Betty’s face. Her eyes stared at him horror-stricken. She sat, a figure of ice—except for her eyes which blazed.
“That’s terrible,” she said with a low voice, and again “That’s terrible!” Then with a cry she stood erect “You shall see! Come!” and she ran towards the motorcar.
The sunlit day was spoilt for both of them. Betty drove homewards, bending over the wheel, her eyes fixed ahead. But Frobisher wondered whether she saw anything at all of that white road which the car devoured. Once as they dropped from the highland and the forests to the plains, she said:
“We shall abide by what we see?”
“Yes.”
“If Hanaud thinks her innocent, she should stay. If he thinks her guilty, she must go.”
“Yes,” said Frobisher.
Betty guided the car through the streets of the city, and into a wide square. A great church of the Renaissance type, with octagonal cupolas upon its two towers and another little cupola surmounted by a loggia above its porch, confronted them. Betty stopped the car and led Frobisher into the porch. Above the door was a great bas-relief of the Last Judgment, God amongst the clouds, angels blowing trumpets, and the damned rising from their graves to undergo their torments. Both Betty and Frobisher gazed at the representation for a while in silence. To Frobisher it was a cruel and brutal piece of work which well matched Hanaud’s revelation of his true belief.
“Yes, the message is easy to read,” he said: and they drove back in a melancholy silence to the Maison Grenelle.
The chauffeur, Georges, came forward from the garage to take charge of the car. Betty ran inside the house and waited for Jim Frobisher to join her.
“I am so sorry,” she said in a broken voice. “I kept a hope somewhere that we were all mistaken … I mean as to the danger Ann was in. … I don’t believe for a moment in her guilt, of course. But she must go—that’s clear.”
She went slowly up the stairs, and Jim saw no more of her until dinner was served long after its usual hour. Ann Upcott he had not seen at all that day, nor did he even see her then. Betty came to him in the library a few minutes before nine.
“We are very late, I am afraid. There are just the two of us, Jim,” she said with a smile, and she led the way into the dining-room.
Through the meal she was anxious and preoccupied, nodding her assent to anything that he said, with her thoughts far away and answering him at random, or not answering him at all. She was listening, Frobisher fancied, for some sound in the hall, an expected sound which was overdue. For her eyes went continually to the clock, and a flurry and agitation, very strange in one naturally so still, became more and more evident in her manner. At length, just before ten o’clock, they both heard the horn of a motorcar in the quiet street. The car stopped, as it seemed to Frobisher, just outside the gates, and upon that there followed the sound for which Betty had so anxiously been listening—the closing of a heavy door by someone careful to close it quietly. Betty shot a quick glance at Jim Frobisher and coloured when he intercepted it. A few seconds afterwards the car moved on, and Betty drew a long breath. Jim Frobisher leaned forward to Betty. Though they were alone in the room, he spoke in a low voice of surprise:
“Ann Upcott has gone then?”
“Yes.”
“So soon? You had everything already arranged then?”
“It was all arranged yesterday evening. She should be in Paris tomorrow morning, England tomorrow night. If only all goes well!”
Even in the stress of her anxiety Betty had been sensitive to a tiny note of discontent in Jim Frobisher’s questions. He had been left out of the counsels of the two girls, their arrangements had been made without his participation, he had only been told of them at the last minute, just as if he was a babbler not to be trusted and an incompetent whose advice would only have been a waste of time. Betty made her excuses.
“It would have been better, of course, if we had got you to help us, Jim. But Ann wouldn’t have it. She insisted that you had come out here on my account, and that you mustn’t be dragged into such an affair as her flight and escape at all. She made it a condition, so I had to give way. But you can help me now tremendously.”
Jim was appeased. Betty at all events had wanted him, was still alarmed lest their plan undertaken without his advice might miscarry.
“How can I help?”
“You can go to that cinema and keep Monsieur Hanaud engaged. It’s important that he should know nothing about Ann’s flight until late tomorrow.”
Jim laughed at the futility of Hanaud’s devices to hide himself. It was obviously all over the town that he spent his evenings in the Grande Taverne.
“Yes, I’ll go,” he returned.
