She turned abruptly. The room was empty. Yet without doubt it was from within the room that the faint noise had come. And there was only one place from which it could have come. Someone was hiding within the elaborate Sedan chair with its shining grey panels, its delicate gold beading. Ann was uneasy rather than frightened. Her first thought was to ring the bell by the fireplace—she could do that well out of view of the Sedan chair—and carry on until Gaston answered it. There were treasures enough in the room to repay a hundred thieves. Then, without arguing at all, she took the bolder line. She went quietly towards the chair, advancing from the back, and then with a rush planted herself in front of the glass doors.
She started back with a cry of surprise. The rail in front of the doors was down, the doors were open, and leaning back upon the billowy cushions sat Betty Harlowe. She sat quite still, still as an image even after Ann had appeared and uttered a cry of surprise; but she was not asleep. Her great eyes were blazing steadily out of the darkness of the chair in a way which gave Ann a curious shock.
“I have been watching you,” said Betty very slowly; and if ever there had been a chance that she would relent, that chance was gone forever now. She had come up out of the secret passage to find Ann playing with her watch in front of the mirror, seeking for an explanation of the doubt which troubled her and so near to it—so very near to it! Ann heard her own death sentence pronounced in those words, “I have been watching you.” And though she did not understand the menace they conveyed, there was something in the slow, steady utterance of them which a little unnerved her.
“Betty,” she cried, “I want your advice.”
Betty came out of the chair and took the anonymous letter from her hand.
“Ought I to go?” Ann Upcott asked.
“It’s your affair,” Betty replied. “In your place I should. I shouldn’t hesitate. No one knows yet that there’s any suspicion upon you.”
Ann put forward her objection. To go from this house of mourning might appear an outrage.
“You’re not a relation,” Betty argued. “You can go privately, just before the time. I have no doubt we can arrange it all. But of course it’s your affair.”
“Why should the Scourge help me?”
“I don’t suppose that he is, except indirectly,” Betty reasoned. “I imagine that he’s attacking other people, and using you.” She read through the letter again. “He has always been right, hasn’t he? That’s what would determine me in your place. But I don’t want to interfere.”
Ann spun round on her heel.
“Very well. I shall go.”
“Then I should destroy that letter”; and she made as if to tear it.
“No!” cried Ann, and she held out her hand for it. “I don’t know Madame Le Vay’s house very well. I might easily lose my way without the instructions. I must take it with me.”
Betty agreed and handed the letter back.
“You want to go quite quietly,” she said, and she threw herself heart and soul into the necessary arrangements.
She would give Francine Rollard a holiday and herself help Ann to dress in her fanciful and glistening frock. She wrote a letter to Michel Le Vay, Madame Le Vay’s second son and one of Betty’s most indefatigable courtiers. Fortunately for himself, Michel Le Vay kept that letter, and it saved him from any charge of complicity in her plot. For Betty used to him the same argument which had persuaded Jim Frobisher. She wrote frankly that suspicion had centred upon Ann Upcott and that it was necessary that she should get away secretly.
“All the plans have been made, Michel,” she wrote. “Ann will come late. She is to meet the friends who will help her—it is best that you should know as little as possible about them—in the little library. If you will keep the corridor clear for a little while, they can get out by the library doors into the park and be in Paris the next morning.”
She sealed up this letter without showing it to Ann and said, “I will send this by a messenger tomorrow morning, with orders to deliver it into Michel’s own hands. Now how are you to go?”
Over that point the two girls had some discussion. It would be inviting Hanaud’s interference if the big limousine were ordered out. What more likely than that he should imagine Ann meant to run away and that Betty was helping her? That plan certainly would not do.
“I know,” Betty cried. “Jeanne Leclerc shall call for you. You will be ready to slip out. She shall stop her car for a second outside the gates. It will be quite dark. You’ll be away in a flash.”
“Jeanne Leclerc!” Ann exclaimed, drawing back.
It had always perplexed Ann that Betty, so exquisite and fastidious in her own looks and bearing, should have found her friends amongst the flamboyant and the cheap. But she would rather throne it amongst her inferiors than take her place amongst her equals. Under her reserved demeanour she was insatiable of recognition. The desire to be courted, admired, looked up to as a leader and a chief, burned within her like a raging flame. Jeanne Leclerc was of her company of satellites—a big, red-haired woman of excessive manners, not without good looks of a kind, and certainly received in the society of the town. Ann Upcott not merely disliked, but distrusted her. She had a feeling that there was something indefinably wrong in her very nature.
“She will do anything for me, Ann,” said Betty. “That’s why I named her.
