CHAPTER ONE: Letters of Mark (continued 2)

"Thank you," she said with a note of bitterness, and her deep eyes gleamed with resentment. Jim understood the change and sympathised with it. Hanaud had spoken of setting a trap when he had set none. For there was no conceivable reason why she should hesitate to admit that she had seen Mrs. Harlowe in the presence of the nurse, and wished her good night before she went to the party. But he had set a real trap a minute afterwards and into that Betty had straightway stumbled. He had tricked her into admitting a dread that Mrs. Harlowe might have spoken of her in disparagement or even in horror after she had left the bedroom.

"You must know, Monsieur Hanaud," she explained very coldly, "that women are not always very generous to one another, and sometimes have not the imagination—how shall I put it?—to visualise the possible consequences of things they may say with merely the intention to hurt and do a little harm. Jeanne Baudin and I were, so far as I ever knew, good friends, but one is never sure, and when you folded up her statement in a hurry I was naturally very anxious to hear the rest of it."

"Yes, I agree," Jim intervened. "It did look as if the nurse might have added something malevolent, which could neither be proved nor disproved."

"It was a misunderstanding, Mademoiselle," Hanaud replied in a voice of apology. "We will take care that there shall not be any other." He looked over the nurse's statement again.

"It is said here that you saw that Madame had her favourite books and her drink beside the bed. That is true."

"Yes, Monsieur."

"What was that drink?"

"A glass of lemonade."

"It was placed on a table, I suppose, ready for her every night?"

"Every night."

"And there was no narcotic dissolved in it?"

"None," Betty replied. "If Mrs. Harlowe was restless, the nurse would give an opium pill and very occasionally a slight injection of morphia."

"But that was not done on this night?"

"Not to my knowledge. If it was done, it was done after my departure."

"Very well," said Hanaud, and he folded the paper and put it away in his pocket. "That is finished with. We have you now out of the house at five minutes to nine in the evening, and Madame in her bed with her health no worse than usual."

"Yes."

"Good!" Hanaud changed his attitude. "Now let us go over your evening, Mademoiselle! I take it that you stayed at the house of M. de Pouillac until you returned home."

"Yes."

"You remember with whom you danced? If it was necessary, could you give me a list of your partners?"

She rose and, crossing to the writing table, sat down in front of it. She drew a sheet of paper towards her and took up a pencil. Pausing now and again to jog her memory with the blunt end of the pencil at her lips, she wrote down a list of names.

"These are all, I think," she said, handing the list to Hanaud. He put it in his pocket.

"Thank you!" He was all contentment now. Although his questions followed without hesitation, one upon the other, it seemed to Jim that he was receiving just the answers which he expected. He had the air of a man engaged upon an inevitable formality and anxious to get it completely accomplished, rather than of one pressing keenly a strict investigation.

"Now, Mademoiselle, at what hour did you arrive home?"

"At twenty minutes past one."

"You are sure of that exact time? You looked at your watch? Or at the clock in the hall? Or what? How are you sure that you reached the Maison Grenelle exactly at twenty minutes past one?"

Hanaud hitched his chair a little more forward, but he had not to wait a second for the answer.

"There is no clock in the hall and I had no watch with me," Betty replied. "I don't like those wrist-watches which some girls wear. I hate things round my wrists," and she shook her arm impatiently, as though she imagined the constriction of a bracelet. "And I did not put my watch in my hand-bag because I am so liable to leave that behind. So I had nothing to tell me the time when I reached home. I was not sure that I had not kept Georges—the chauffeur—out a little later than he cared for. So I made him my excuse, explaining that I didn't really know how late I was."

"I see. It was Georges who told you the time at the actual moment of your arrival?"

"Yes."

"And Georges is no doubt the chauffeur whom I saw at work as I crossed the courtyard?"

"Yes. He told me that he was glad to see me have a little gaiety, and he took out his watch and showed it to me with a laugh."

"This happened at the front door, or at those big iron gates, Mademoiselle?" Hanaud asked.

"At the front door. There is no lodge-keeper and the gates are left open when any one is out."

"And how did you get into the house?"

"I used my latch-key."

"Good! All this is very clear."

Betty, however, was not mollified by Hanaud's satisfaction with her replies. Although she answered him without delay, her answers were given mutinously. Jim began to be a little troubled. She should have met Hanaud half-way; she was imprudently petulant.

"She'll make an enemy of this man before she has done," he reflected uneasily. But he glanced at the detective and was relieved. For Hanaud was watching her with a smile which would have disarmed any less offended young lady—a smile half friendliness and half amusement. Jim took a turn upon himself.

"After all," he argued, "this very imprudence pleads for her better than any calculation. The guilty don't behave like that." And he waited for the next stage in the examination with an easy mind.

"Now we have got you back home and within the Maison Grenelle before half past one in the morning," resumed Hanaud. "What did you do then?"

"I went straight upstairs to my bedroom," said Betty.

"Was your maid waiting up for you, Mademoiselle?"

"No; I had told her that I should be late and that I could undress myself."

"You are considerate, Mademoiselle. No wonder that your servants were pleased that you should have a little gaiety."

Even that advance did not appease the offended girl.

"Yes?" she asked with a sort of silky sweetness which was more hostile than any acid rejoinder. But it did not stir Hanaud to any resentment.

"When, then, did you first hear of Madame Harlowe's death?" was asked.

"The next morning my maid Francine came running into my room at seven o'clock. The nurse Jeanne had just discovered it. I slipped on my dressing-gown and ran downstairs. As soon as I saw that it was true, I rang up the two doctors who were in the habit of attending here."

"Did you notice the glass of lemonade?"

"Yes. It was empty."

"Your maid is still with you?"

"Yes—Francine Rollard. She is at your disposal."

Hanaud shrugged his shoulders and smiled doubtfully.

"That, if it is necessary at all, can come later. We have the story of your movements now from you, Mademoiselle, and that is what is important."

He rose from his chair.

"I have been, I am afraid, a very troublesome person, Mademoiselle Harlowe," he said with a bow. "But it is very necessary for your own sake that no obscurities should be left for the world's suspicions to play with. And we are very close to the end of this ordeal."

Jim had nursed a hope the moment Hanaud rose that this wearing interview had already ended. Betty, for her part, was indifferent.

"That is for you to say, Monsieur," she said implacably.

"Just two points then, and I think, upon reflection, you will understand that I have asked you no question which is unfair."

Betty bowed.

"Your two points, Monsieur."

"First, then. You inherit, I believe, the whole fortune of Madame?"

"Yes."

"Did you expect to inherit it all? Did you know of her will?"

"No. I expected that a good deal of the money would be left to Monsieur Boris. But I don't remember that she ever told me so. I expected it, because Monsieur Boris so continually repeated that it was so."

"No doubt," said Hanaud lightly. "As to yourself, was Madame generous to you during her life."

The hard look disappeared from Betty's face. It softened to sorrow and regret.

"Very," she answered in a low voice. "I had one thousand pounds a year as a regular allowance, and a thousand pounds goes a long way in Dijon. Besides, if I wanted more, I had only to ask for it."

Betty's voice broke in a sob suddenly and Hanaud turned away with a delicacy for which Jim was not prepared. He began to look at the books upon the shelves, that she might have time to control her sorrow, taking down one here, one there, and speaking of them in a casual tone.

"It is easy to see that this was the library of Monsieur Simon Harlowe," he said, and was suddenly brought to a stop. For the door was thrown open and a girl broke into the room.

"Betty," she began, and stood staring from one to another of Betty's visitors.

"Ann, this is Monsieur Hanaud," said Betty with a careless wave of her hand, and Ann went white as a sheet.

Ann! Then this girl was Ann Upcott, thought Jim Frobisher, the girl who had written to him, the girl, all acquaintanceship with whom he had twice denied, and he had sat side by side with her, he had even spoken to her. She swept across the room to him.

"So you have come!" she cried. "But I knew that you would!"

Jim was conscious of a mist of shining yellow hair, a pair of sapphire eyes, and of a face impertinently lovely and most delicate in its colour.

"Of course I have come," he said feebly, and Hanaud looked on with a smile. He had an eye on Betty Harlowe, and the smile said as clearly as words could say, "That young man is going to have a deal of trouble before he gets out of Dijon."

CHAPTER SIX: Jim Changes His Lodging

The library was a big oblong room with two tall windows looking into the court, and the observation window thrown out at the end over the footway of the street. A door in the inner wall close to this window led to a room behind, and a big open fire-place faced the windows on the court. For the rest, the walls were lined with high book-shelves filled with books, except for a vacant space here and there where a volume had been removed. Hanaud put back in its place the book which he had been holding in his hand.

"One can easily see that this is the library of Simon Harlowe, the collector," he said. "I have always thought that if one only had the time to study and compare the books which a man buys and reads, one would more surely get the truth of him than in any other way. But alas! one never has the time." He turned towards Jim Frobisher regretfully. "Come and stand with me, Monsieur Frobisher. For even a glance at the backs of them tells one something."

Jim took his place by Hanaud's side.

"Look, here is a book on Old English Gold Plate, and another—pronounce that title for me, if you please."

Jim read the title of the book on which Hanaud's finger was placed.

"Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain."

Hanaud repeated the inscription and moved along. From a shelf at the level of his breast and just to the left of the window in which Betty was sitting, he took a large, thinnish volume in a paper cover, and turned over the plates. It was a brochure upon Battersea Enamel.

"There should be a second volume," said Jim Frobisher with a glance at the bookshelf. It was the idlest of remarks. He was not paying any attention to the paper-covered book upon Battersea Enamel. For he was really engaged in speculating why Hanaud had called him to his side. Was it on the chance that he might detect some swift look of understanding as it was exchanged by the two girls, some sign that they were in a collusion? If so, he was to be disappointed. For though Betty and Ann were now free from Hanaud's vigilant eye, neither of them moved, neither of them signalled to the other. Hanaud, however, seemed entirely interested in his book. He answered Jim's suggestion.

"Yes, one would suppose that there were a second volume. But this is complete," he said, and he put back the book in its place. There was room next to it for another quarto book, so long as it was no thicker, and Hanaud rested his finger in the vacant place on the shelf, with his thoughts clearly far away.

Betty recalled him to his surroundings.

"Monsieur Hanaud," she said in her quiet voice from her seat in the window, "there was a second point, you said, on which you would like to ask me a question."

"Yes, Mademoiselle, I had not forgotten it."

He turned with a curiously swift movement and stood so that he had both girls in front of him, Betty on his left in the window, Ann Upcott standing a little apart upon his right, gazing at him with a look of awe.

"Have you, Mademoiselle," he asked, "been pestered, since Boris Waberski brought his accusation, with any of these anonymous letters which seem to be flying about Dijon?"

"I have received one," answered Betty, and Ann Upcott raised her eyebrows in surprise. "It came on Sunday morning. It was very slanderous, of course, and I should have taken no notice of it but for one thing. It told me that you, Monsieur Hanaud, were coming from Paris to take up the case."

"Oho!" said Hanaud softly. "And you received this letter on the Sunday morning? Can you show it to me, Mademoiselle?"

Betty shook her head.

"No, Monsieur."

Hanaud smiled.

"Of course not. You destroyed it, as such letter should be destroyed."

"No, I didn't," Betty answered. "I kept it. I put it away in a drawer of my writing-table in my own sitting-room. But that room is sealed up, Monsieur Hanaud. The letter is in the drawer still."

Hanaud received the statement with a frank satisfaction.

"It cannot run away, then, Mademoiselle," he said contentedly. But the contentment passed. "So the Commissaire of Police actually sealed up your private sitting-room. That, to be sure, was going a little far."

Betty shrugged her shoulders.

"It was mine, you see, where I keep my private things. And after all I was accused!" she said bitterly; but Ann Upcott was not satisfied to leave the matter there. She drew a step nearer to Betty and then looked at Hanaud.

"But that is not all the truth," she said. "Betty's room belongs to that suite of rooms in which Madame Harlowe's bedroom was arranged. It is the last room of the suite opening on to the hall, and for that reason, as the Commissaire said with an apology, it was necessary to seal it up with the others."

"I thank you, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud with a smile. "Yes, that of course softens his action." He looked whimsically at Betty in the window-seat. "It has been my misfortune, I am afraid, to offend Mademoiselle Harlowe. Will you help me to get all these troublesome dates now clear? Madame Harlowe was buried, I understand, on the Saturday morning twelve days ago!"

"Yes, Monsieur," said Ann Upcott.

"And after the funeral, on your return to this house, the notary opened and read the will?"

"Yes, Monsieur."

"And in Boris Waberski's presence?"

"Yes."

"Then exactly a week later, on Saturday, the seventh of May, he goes off quickly to the Prefecture of Police?"

"Yes."

"And on Sunday morning by the post comes the anonymous letter?"

Hanaud turned away to Betty, who bowed her head in answer.

"And a little later on the same morning comes the Commissaire, who seals the doors."

"At eleven o'clock, to be exact," replied Ann Upcott.

Hanaud bowed low.

"You are both wonderful young ladies. You notice the precise hour at which things happen. It is a rare gift, and very useful to people like myself."

Ann Upcott had been growing easier and easier in her manner with each answer that she gave. Now she could laugh outright.

"I do, at all events, Monsieur Hanaud," she said. "But alas! I was born to be an old maid. A chair out of place, a book disarranged, a clock not keeping time, or even a pin on the carpet—I cannot bear these things. I notice them at once and I must put them straight. Yes, it was precisely eleven o'clock when the Commissaire of Police rang the bell."

"Did he search the rooms before he sealed them?" Hanaud asked.

"No. We both of us thought his negligence strange," Ann replied, "until he informed us that the Examining Magistrate wanted everything left just as it was."

Hanaud laughed genially.

"That was on my account," he explained. "Who could tell what wonderful things Hanaud might not discover with his magnifying glass when he arrived from Paris? What fatal fingerprints! Oh! Ho! ho! What scraps of burnt letter! Ah! Ha! ha! But I tell you, Mademoiselle, that if a crime has been committed in this house, even Hanaud would not expect to make any startling discoveries in rooms which had been open to the whole household for a fortnight since the crime. However," and he moved towards the door, "since I am here now——"

Betty was upon her feet like a flash of lightning. Hanaud stopped and swung round upon her, swiftly, with his eyes very challenging and hard.

"You are going to break those seals now?" she asked with a curious breathlessness. "Then may I come with you—please, please! It is I who am accused. I have a right to be present," and her voice rose into an earnest cry.

"Calm yourself, Mademoiselle," Hanaud returned gently. "No advantage will be taken of you. I am going to break no seals. That, as I have told you, is the right of the Commissaire, who is a magistrate, and he will not move until the medical analysis is ready. No, what I was going to propose was that Mademoiselle here," and he pointed to Ann, "should show me the outside of those reception-rooms and the rest of the house."

"Of course," said Betty, and she sat down again in the window-seat.

"Thank you," said Hanaud. He turned back to Ann Upcott. "Shall we go? And as we go, will you tell me what you think of Boris Waberski?"

"He has some nerve. I can tell you that, Monsieur Hanaud," Ann cried. "He actually came back to this house after he had lodged his charge, and asked me to support him"; and she passed out of the room in front of Hanaud.

Jim Frobisher followed the couple to the door and closed it behind them. The last few minutes had set his mind altogether at rest. The author of the anonymous letters was the detective's real quarry. His manner had quite changed when putting his questions about them. The flamboyancies and the indifference, even his amusement at Betty's ill-humour had quite disappeared. He had got to business watchfully, quietly. Jim came back into the room. He took his cigarette-case from his pocket and opened it.

"May I smoke?" he asked. As he turned to Betty for permission, a fresh shock brought his thoughts and words alike to a standstill. She was staring at him with panic naked in her eyes and her face set like a tragic mask.

"He believes me guilty," she whispered.

"No," said Jim, and he went to her side. But she would not listen.

"He does. I am sure of it. Don't you see that he was bound to? He was sent from Paris. He has his reputation to think of. He must have his victim before he returns."

Jim was sorely tempted to break his word. He had only to tell the real cause which had fetched Hanaud out of Paris and Betty's distress was gone. But he could not. Every tradition of his life strove to keep him silent. He dared not even tell her that this charge against her was only an excuse. She must live in anxiety for a little while longer. He laid his hand gently upon her shoulder.

"Betty, don't believe that!" he said, with a consciousness of how weak that phrase was compared with the statement he could have made. "I was watching Hanaud, listening to him. I am sure that he already knew the answers to the questions he was asking you. Why, he even knew that Simon Harlowe had a passion for collecting, though not a word had been said of it. He was asking questions to see how you would answer them, setting now and then a little trap, as he admitted——"

"Yes," said Betty in trembling voice, "all the time he was setting traps."

"And every answer that you gave, even your manner in giving them," Jim continued stoutly, "more and more made clear your innocence."

"To him?" asked Betty.

"Yes, to him. I am sure of it."

Betty Harlowe caught at his arm and held it in both her hands. She leaned her head against it. Through the sleeve of his coat he felt the velvet of her cheek.

"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you, Jim," and as she pronounced the name she smiled. She was thanking him not so much for the stout confidence of his words, as for the comfort which the touch of him gave to her.

"Very likely I am making too much of little things," she went on. "Very likely I am ungenerous, too, to Monsieur Hanaud. But he lives amidst crimes and criminals. He must be so used to seeing people condemned and passing out of sight into blackness and horrors, that one more or less, whether innocent or guilty, going that way, wouldn't seem to matter very much."

"Yes, Betty, I think that is a little unjust," Jim Frobisher remarked gently.

"Very well, I take it back," she said, and she let his arm go. "All the same, Jim, I am looking to you, not to him," and she laughed with an appealing tremor in the laugh which took his heart by storm.

"Luckily," said he, "you don't have to look to any one," and he had hardly finished the sentence before Ann Upcott came back alone into the room. She was about Betty's height and Betty's age and had the same sort of boyish slenderness and carriage which marks the girls of this generation. But in other respects, even to the colour of her clothes, she was as dissimilar as one girl can be from another. She was dressed in white from her coat to her shoes, and she wore a big gold hat so that one was almost at a loss to know where her hat ended and her hair began.

"And Monsieur Hanaud?" Betty asked.

"He is prowling about by himself," she replied. "I showed him all the rooms and who used them, and he said that he would have a look at them and sent me back to you."

"Did he break the seals on the reception-rooms?" Betty Harlowe asked.

"Oh, no," said Ann. "Why, he told us that he couldn't do that without the Commissaire."

"Yes, he told us that," Betty remarked dryly. "But I was wondering whether he meant what he told us."

"Oh, I don't think Monsieur Hanaud's alarming," said Ann. She gave Jim Frobisher the impression that at any moment she might call him a dear old thing. She had quite got over the first little shock which the announcement of his presence had caused her. "Besides," and she sat down by the side of Betty in the window-seat and looked with the frankest confidence at Jim—"besides, we can feel safe now, anyway."

Jim Frobisher threw up his hands in despair. That queer look of aloofness had played him false with Ann Upcott now, as it had already done with Betty. If these two girls had called on him for help when a sudden squall found them in an open sailing-boat with the sheet of the sail made fast, or on the ice-slope of a mountain, or with a rhinoceros lumbering towards them out of some forest of the Nile, he would not have shrunk from their trust. But this was quite a different matter. They were calmly pitting him against Hanaud.

"You were safe before," he exclaimed. "Hanaud is not your enemy, and as for me, I have neither experience nor natural gifts for this sort of work"—and he broke off with a groan. For both the girls were watching him with a smile of complete disbelief.

"Good heavens, they think that I am being astute," he reflected, "and the more I confess my incapacity the astuter they'll take me to be." He gave up all arguments. "Of course I am absolutely at your service," he said.

"Thank you," said Betty. "You will bring your luggage from your hotel and stay here, won't you?"

Jim was tempted to accept that invitation. But, on the one hand, he might wish to see Hanaud at the Grande Taverne; or Hanaud might wish to see him, and secrecy was to be the condition of such meetings. It was better that he should keep his freedom of movement complete.

"I won't put you to so much trouble, Betty," he replied. "There's no reason in the world that I should. A call over the telephone and in five minutes I am at your side."

Betty Harlowe seemed in doubt to press her invitation or not.

"It looks a little inhospitable in me," she began, and the door opened, and Hanaud entered the room.

"I left my hat and stick here," he said. He picked them up and bowed to the girls.

"You have seen everything, Monsieur Hanaud?" Betty asked.

"Everything, Mademoiselle. I shall not trouble you again until the report of the analysis is in my hands. I wish you a good morning."

Betty slipped off the window-seat and accompanied him out into the hall. It appeared to Jim Frobisher that she was seeking to make some amends for her ill-humour; and when he heard her voice he thought to detect in it some note of apology.

"I shall be very glad if you will let me know the sense of that report as soon as possible," she pleaded. "You, better than any one, will understand that this is a difficult hour for me."

"I understand very well, Mademoiselle," Hanaud answered gravely. "I will see to it that the hour is not prolonged."

Jim, watching them through the doorway, as they stood together in the sunlit hall, felt ever so slight a touch upon his arm. He wheeled about quickly. Ann Upcott was at his side with all the liveliness and even the delicate colour gone from her face, and a wild and desperate appeal in her eyes.

"You will come and stay here? Oh, please!" she whispered.

"I have just refused," he answered. "You heard me."

"I know," she went on, the words stumbling over one another from her lips. "But take back your refusal. Do! Oh, I am frightened out of my wits. I don't understand anything. I am terrified!" And she clasped her hands together in supplication. Jim had never seen fear so stark, no, not even in Betty's eyes a few minutes ago. It robbed her exquisite face of all its beauty, and made it in a second, haggard and old. But before he could answer, a stick clattered loudly upon the pavement of the hall and startled them both like the crack of a pistol.

Jim looked through the doorway. Hanaud was stooping to pick up his cane. Betty made a dive for it, but Hanaud already had it in his hands.

"I thank you, Mademoiselle, but I can still touch my toes. Every morning I do it five times in my pyjamas," and with a laugh he ran down the couple of steps into the courtyard and with that curiously quick saunter of his was out into the street of Charles-Robert in a moment. When Jim turned again to Ann Upcott, the fear had gone from her face so completely that he could hardly believe his eyes.

"Betty, he is going to stay," she cried gaily.

"So I inferred," replied Betty with a curious smile as she came back into the room.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Exit Waberski

Jim Frobisher neither saw nor heard any more of Hanaud that day. He fetched his luggage away from the hotel and spent the evening with Betty Harlowe and Ann Upcott at the Maison Grenelle. They took their coffee after dinner in the garden behind the house, descending to it by a short flight of stone steps from a great door at the back of the hall. And by some sort of unspoken compact they avoided all mention of Waberski's charge. They had nothing to do but to wait now for the analyst's report. But the long line of high, shuttered windows just above their heads, the windows of the reception-rooms, forbade them to forget the subject, and their conversation perpetually dwindled down into long silences. It was cool out here in the dark garden, cool and very still; so that the bustle of a bird amongst the leaves of the sycamores startled them and the rare footsteps of a passer-by in the little street of Charles-Robert rang out as though they would wake a dreaming city. Jim noticed that once or twice Ann Upcott leaned swiftly forward and stared across the dark lawns and glimmering paths to the great screen of tall trees, as if her eyes had detected a movement amongst their stems. But on each occasion she said nothing and with an almost inaudible sigh sank back in her chair.

"Is there a door into the garden from the street?" Frobisher asked, and Betty answered him.

"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 roof-tops 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 to-night." 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 to-morrow. 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 the examining magistrate on the same day? And if he did, to whom did he talk between the time when he saw the magistrate and the time when letters must be posted if they are to be delivered on the Sunday morning? These are questions I must have the answer to, and if we at once administer the knock-out with your letters, I shall not get them. I must lead him on with friendliness. You see that."

Jim very reluctantly did. He had longed to see Hanaud dealing with Waberski in the most outrageous of his moods, pouncing and tearing and trampling with the gibes of a schoolboy and the improprieties of the gutter. Hanaud indeed had promised him as much. But he found him now all for restraint and sobriety and more concerned apparently with the authorship of the anonymous letters than with the righting of Betty Harlowe. Jim felt that he had been defrauded.

"But I am to meet this man," he said. "That must not be forgotten."

"And it shall not be," Hanaud assured him. He led him over to the door in the inner wall close to the observation window and opened it.

"See! If you will please to wait in here," and as the disappointment deepened on Jim's face, he added, "Oh, I do not ask you to shut the door. No. Bring up a chair to it—so! And keep the door ajar so! Then you will see and hear and yet not be seen. You are content? Not very. You would prefer to be on the stage the whole time like an actor. Yes, we all do. But, at all events, you do not throw up your part," and with a friendly grin he turned back to the table.

A shuffling step which merged into the next step with a curiously slovenly sound rose from the courtyard.

"It was time we made our little arrangements," said Hanaud in an undertone. "For here comes our hero from the Steppes."

Jim popped his head through the doorway.

"Monsieur Hanaud!" he whispered excitedly. "Monsieur Hanaud! It cannot be wise to leave those windows open on the courtyard. For if we can hear a footstep so loudly in this room, anything said in this room will be easily overheard in the court."

"But how true that is!" Hanaud replied in the same voice and struck his forehead with his fist in anger at his folly. "But what are we to do? The day is so hot. This room will be an oven. The ladies and Waberski will all faint. Besides, I have an officer in plain clothes already stationed in the court to see that it is kept empty. Yes, we will risk it."

Jim drew back.

"That man doesn't welcome advice from any one," he said indignantly, but he said it only to himself; and almost before he had finished, the bell rang. A few seconds afterwards Gaston entered.

"Monsieur Boris," he said.

"Yes," said Hanaud with a nod. "And will you tell the ladies that we are ready?"

Boris Waberski, a long, round-shouldered man with bent knees and clumsy feet, dressed in black and holding a soft black felt hat in his hand, shambled quickly into the room and stopped dead at the sight of Hanaud. Hanaud bowed and Waberski returned the bow; and then the two men stood looking at one another—Hanaud all geniality and smiles, Waberski a rather grotesque figure of uneasiness like one of those many grim caricatures carved by the imagination of the Middle Ages on the columns of the churches of Dijon. He blinked in perplexity at the detective and with his long, tobacco-stained fingers tortured his grey moustache.

"Will you be seated?" said Hanaud politely. "I think that the ladies will not keep us waiting."

He pointed towards a chair in front of the writing-table but on his left hand and opposite to the door.

"I don't understand," said Waberski doubtfully. "I received a message. I understood that the Examining Magistrate had sent for me."

"I am his agent," said Hanaud. "I am——" and he stopped. "Yes?"

Boris Waberski stared.

"I said nothing."

"I beg your pardon. I am—Hanaud."

He shot the name out quickly, but he was answered by no start, nor by any sign of recognition.

"Hanaud?" Waberski shook his head. "That no doubt should be sufficient to enlighten me," he said with a smile, "but it is better to be frank—it doesn't."

"Hanaud of the Sûrété of Paris."

And upon Waberski's face there came slowly a look of utter consternation.

"Oh!" he said, and again "Oh!" with a lamentable look towards the door as if he was in two minds whether to make a bolt of it. Hanaud pointed again to the chair, and Waberski murmured, "Yes—to be sure," and made a little run to it and sank down.

Jim Frobisher, watching from his secret place, was certain of one thing. Boris Waberski had not written the anonymous letter to Betty nor had he contributed the information about Hanaud to the writer. He might well have been thought to have been acting ignorance of Hanaud's name, up to the moment when Hanaud explained who Hanaud was. But no longer. His consternation then was too genuine.

"You will understand, of course, that an accusation so serious as the one you have brought against Mademoiselle Harlowe demands the closest inquiry," Hanaud continued without any trace of irony, "and the Examining Magistrate in charge of the case honoured us in Paris with a request for help."

"Yes, it is very difficult," replied Boris Waberski, twisting about as if he was a martyr on red-hot plates.

But the difficulty was Waberski's, as Jim, with that distressed man in full view, was now able to appreciate. Waberski had rushed to the Prefecture when no answer came from Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt to his letter of threats, and had brought his charge in a spirit of disappointment and rancour, with a hope no doubt that some offer of cash would be made to him and that he could withdraw it. Now he found the trained detective service of France upon his heels, asking for his proofs and evidence. This was more than he had bargained for.

"I thought," Hanaud continued easily, "that a little informal conversation between you and me and the two young ladies, without shorthand writers or secretaries, might be helpful."

"Yes, indeed," said Waberski hopefully.

"As a preliminary of course," Hanaud added dryly, "a preliminary to the more serious and now inevitable procedure."

Waberski's gleam of hopefulness was extinguished.

"To be sure," he murmured, plucking at his lean throat nervously. "Cases must proceed."

"That is what they are there for," said Hanaud sententiously; and the door of the library was pushed open. Betty came into the room with Ann Upcott immediately behind her.

"You sent for me," she began to Hanaud, and then she saw Boris Waberski. Her little head went up with a jerk, her eyes smouldered. "Monsieur Boris," she said, and again she spoke to Hanaud. "Come to take possession, I suppose?" Then she looked round the room for Jim Frobisher, and exclaimed in a sudden dismay:

"But I understood that——" and Hanaud was just in time to stop her from mentioning any name.

"All in good time, Mademoiselle," he said quickly. "Let us take things in their order."

Betty took her old place in the window-seat. Ann Upcott shut the door and sat down in a chair a little apart from the others. Hanaud folded up his newspaper and laid it aside. On the big blotting-pad which was now revealed lay one of those green files which Jim Frobisher had noticed in the office of the Sûrété. Hanaud opened it and took up the top paper. He turned briskly to Waberski.

"Monsieur, you state that on the night of the 27th of April, this girl here, Betty Harlowe, did wilfully give to her adoptive mother and benefactress, Jeanne-Marie Harlowe, an overdose of a narcotic by which her death was brought about."

"Yes," said Waberski with an air of boldness, "I declare that."

"You do not specify the narcotic?"

"It was probably morphine, but I cannot be sure."

"And administered, according to you, if this summary which I hold here is correct, in the glass of lemonade which Madame Harlowe had always at her bedside."

"Yes."

Hanaud laid the sheet of foolscap down again.

"You do not charge the nurse, Jeanne Baudin, with complicity in this crime?" he asked.

"Oh, no!" Waberski exclaimed with a sort of horror, with his eyes open wide and his eyebrows running up his forehead towards his hedge of wiry hair. "I have not a suspicion of Jeanne Baudin. I pray you, Monsieur Hanaud, to be clear upon that point. There must be no injustice! No! Oh, it is well that I came here to-day! Jeanne Baudin! Listen! I would engage her to nurse me to-morrow, were my health to fail."

"One cannot say more than that," replied Hanaud with a grave sympathy. "I only asked you the question because undoubtedly Jeanne Baudin was in Madame's bedroom when Mademoiselle entered it to wish Madame good night and show off her new dancing-frock."

"Yes, I understand," said Waberski. He was growing more and more confident, so suave and friendly was this Monsieur Hanaud of the Sûrété. "But the fatal drug was slipped into that glass without a doubt when Jeanne Baudin was not looking. I do not accuse her. No! It is that hard one," and his voice began to shake and his mouth to work, "who slipped it in and then hurried off to dance till morning, whilst her victim died. It is terrible that! Yes, Monsieur Hanaud, it is terrible. My poor sister!"

"Sister-in-law."

The correction came with an acid calm from an armchair near the door in which Ann Upcott was reclining.

"Sister to me!" replied Waberski mournfully and he turned to Hanaud. "Monsieur, I shall never cease to reproach myself. I was away fishing in the forest. If I had stayed at home! Think of it! I ask you to——" and his voice broke.

"Yes, but you did come back, Monsieur Waberski," Hanaud said, "and this is where I am perplexed. You loved your sister. That is clear, since you cannot even think of her without tears."

"Yes, yes," Waberski shaded his eyes with his hand.

"Then why did you, loving her so dearly, wait for so long before you took any action to avenge her death? There will be some good reason not a doubt, but I have not got it." Hanaud continued, spreading out his hands. "Listen to the dates. Your dear sister dies on the night of the 27th of April. You return home on the 28th; and you do nothing, you bring no charge, you sit all quiet. She is buried on the 30th, and after that you still do nothing, you sit all quiet. It is not until one week after that you launch your accusation against Mademoiselle. Why? I beg you, Monsieur Waberski, not to look at me between the fingers, for the answer is not written on my face, and to explain this difficulty to me."

The request was made in the same pleasant, friendly voice which Hanaud had used so far and without any change of intonation. But Waberski snatched his hand away from his forehead and sat up with a flush on his face.

"I answer you at once," he exclaimed. "From the first I knew it here," and he thumped his heart with his fist, "that murder had been committed. But as yet I did not know it here," and he patted his forehead, "in my head. So I think and I think and I think. I see reasons and motives. They build themselves up. A young girl of beauty and style, but of a strange and secret character, thirsting in her heart for colour and laughter and enjoyment and the power which her beauty offers her if she will but grasp it, and yet while thirsting, very able to conceal all sign of thirst. That is the picture I give you of that hard one, Betty Harlowe."

For the first time since the interview had commenced, Betty herself showed some interest in it. Up till now she had sat without a movement, a figure of disdain in an ice-house of pride. Now she flashed into life. She leaned forward, her elbow on her crossed knee, her chin propped in her hand, her eyes on Waberski, and a smile of amusement at this analysis of herself giving life to her face. Jim Frobisher, on the other hand, behind his door felt that he was listening to blasphemies. Why did Hanaud endure it? There was information, he had said, which he wanted to get from Boris Waberski. The point on which he wanted information was settled long ago, at the very beginning of this informal session. It was as clear as daylight that Waberski had nothing to do with Betty's anonymous letter. Why, then, should Hanaud give this mountebank of a fellow a free opportunity to slander Betty Harlowe? Why should he question and question as if there were solid weight in the accusation? Why, in a word, didn't he fling open this door, allow Frobisher to produce the blackmailing letters to Mr. Haslitt, and then stand aside while Boris Waberski was put into that condition in which he would call upon the services of Jeanne Baudin? Jim indeed was furiously annoyed with Monsieur Hanaud. He explained to himself that he was disappointed.

Meanwhile, Boris Waberski, after a little nervous check when Betty had leaned forward, continued his description.

"For such a one Dijon would be tiresome. It is true there was each year a month or so at Monte Carlo, just enough to give one a hint of what might be, like a cigarette to a man who wants to smoke. And then back to Dijon! Ah, Monsieur, not the Dijon of the Dukes of Burgundy, not even the Dijon of the Parliament of the States, but the Dijon of to-day, an ordinary, dull, provincial town of France which keeps nothing of its former gaieties and glory but some old rare buildings and a little spirit of mockery. Imagine, then, Monsieur, this hard one with a fortune and freedom within her grasp if only she has the boldness on some night when Monsieur Boris is out of the way to seize them! Nor is that all. For there is an invalid in the house to whom attentions are owed—yes, and must be given." Waberski, in a flight of excitement checked himself and half closed his eyes, with a little cunning nod. "For the invalid was not so easy. No, even that dear one had her failings. Oh, yes, and we will not forget them when the moment comes for the extenuating pleas. No, indeed," and he flung his arm out nobly. "I myself will be the first to urge them to the judge of the Assizes when the verdict is given."

Betty Harlowe leaned back once more indifferent. From an arm-chair near the door, a little gurgle of laughter broke from the lips of Ann Upcott. Even Hanaud smiled.

"Yes, yes," he said; "but we have not got quite as far as the Court of Assizes, Monsieur Waberski. We are still at the point where you know it in your heart but not in your head."

"That is so," Waberski returned briskly. "On the seventh of May, a Saturday, I bring my accusation to the Prefecture. Why? For, on the morning of that day I am certain. I know it at last here too," and up went his hand to his forehead, and he hitched himself forward on to the edge of his chair.

"I am in the street of Gambetta, one of the small popular new streets, a street with some little shops and a reputation not of the best. At ten o'clock I am passing quickly through that street when from a little shop a few yards in front of me out pops that hard one, my niece."

Suddenly the whole character of that session had changed. Jim Frobisher, though he sat apart from it, felt the new tension, and was aware of the new expectancy. A moment ago Boris Waberski as he sat talking and gesticulating had been a thing for ridicule, almost for outright laughter. Now, though his voice still jumped hysterically from high notes to low notes and his body jerked like a marionette's, he held the eyes of every one—every one, that is, except Betty Harlowe. He was no longer vague. He was speaking of a definite hour and a place and of a definite incident which happened there.

"Yes, in that bad little street I see her. I do not believe my senses. I step into a little narrow alley and I peep round the corner. I peep with my eyes," and Waberski pointed to them with two of his fingers as though there was something peculiarly convincing in the fact that he peeped with them and not with his elbows, "and I am sure. Then I wait until she is out of sight, and I creep forward to see what shop it is she visited in that little street of squalor. Once more I do not believe my eyes. For over the door I read the name, Jean Cladel, Herbalist."

He pronounced the name in a voice of triumph and sat back in his chair, nodding his head violently at intervals of a second. There was not a sound in the room until Hanaud's voice broke the silence.

"I don't understand," he said softly. "Who is this Jean Cladel, and why should a young lady not visit his shop?"

"I beg your pardon," Waberski replied. "You are not of Dijon. No! or you would not have asked that question. Jean Cladel has no better name than the street he very suitably lives in. Ask a Dijonnais about Jean Cladel, and you will see how he becomes silent and shrugs his shoulders as if here was a topic on which it was becoming to be silent. Better still, Monsieur Hanaud, ask at the Prefecture. Jean Cladel! Twice he has been tried for selling prohibited drugs."

Hanaud was stung at last out of his calm.

"What is that?" he cried in a sharp voice.

"Yes, twice, Monsieur. Each time he has scraped through, that is true. He has powerful friends, and witnesses have been spirited away. But he is known! Jean Cladel! Yes, Jean Cladel!"

"Jean Cladel, Herbalist of the street Gambetta," Hanaud repeated slowly. "But"—and he leaned back in an easier attitude—"you will see my difficulty, Monsieur Waberski. Ten o'clock is a public hour. It is not a likely hour for any one to choose for so imprudent a visit, even if that one were stupid."

"Yes, and so I reasoned too," Waberski interposed quickly. "As I told you, I could not believe my eyes. But I made sure—oh, there was no doubt, Monsieur Hanaud. And I thought to myself this. Crimes are discovered because criminals, even the acutest, do sooner or later some foolish thing. Isn't it so? Sometimes they are too careful; they make their proofs too perfect for an imperfect world. Sometimes they are too careless or are driven by necessity to a rash thing. But somehow a mistake is made and justice wins the game."

Hanaud smiled.

"Aha! a student of crime, Monsieur!" He turned to Betty, and it struck upon Jim Frobisher with a curious discomfort that this was the first time Hanaud had looked directly at Betty since the interview had begun.

"And what do you say to this story, Mademoiselle?"

"It is a lie," she answered quietly.

"You did not visit Jean Cladel in the street of Gambetta at ten o'clock on the morning of the 7th of May?"

"I did not, Monsieur."

Waberski smiled and twisted his moustache.

"Of course! Of course! We could not expect Mademoiselle to admit it. One fights for one's skin, eh?"

"But, after all," Hanaud interrupted, with enough savagery in his voice to check all Waberski's complacency, "let us not forget that on the 7th of May, Madame Harlowe had been dead for ten days. Why should Mademoiselle still be going to the shop of Jean Cladel?"

"To pay," said Waberski. "Oh, no doubt Jean Cladel's wares are expensive and have to be paid for more than once, Monsieur."

"By wares you mean poison," said Hanaud. "Let us be explicit."

"Yes."

"Poison which was used to murder Madame Harlowe."

"I say so," Waberski declared, folding his arms across his breast.

"Very well," said Hanaud. He took from his green file a second paper written over in a fine hand and emphasised by an official stamp. "Then what will you say, Monsieur, if I tell you that the body of Madame Harlowe has been exhumed?" Hanaud continued, and Waberski's face lost what little colour it had. He stared at Hanaud, his jaw working up and down nervously, and he did not say a word.

"And what will you say if I tell you," Hanaud continued, "that no more morphia was discovered in it than one sleeping-dose would explain and no trace at all of any other poison?"

In a complete silence Waberski took his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead. The game was up. He had hoped to make his terms, but his bluff was called. He had not one atom of faith in his own accusation. There was but one course for him to take, and that was to withdraw his charge and plead that his affection for his sister-in-law had led him into a gross mistake. But Boris Waberski was never the man for that. He had that extra share of cunning which shipwrecks always the minor rogue. He was unwise enough to imagine that Hanaud might be bluffing too.

He drew his chair a little nearer to the table. He tittered and nodded at Hanaud confidentially.

"You say 'if I tell you,'" he said smoothly. "Yes, but you do not tell me, Monsieur Hanaud—no, not at all. On the contrary, what you say is this: 'My friend Waberski, here is a difficult matter which, if exposed, means a great scandal, and of which the issue is doubtful. There is no good in stirring the mud.'"

"Oh, I say that?" Hanaud asked, smiling pleasantly.

Waberski felt sure of his ground now.

"Yes, and more than that. You say, 'You have been badly treated, my friend Waberski, and if you will now have a little talk with that hard one your niece——'"

And his chair slid back against the bookcase and he sat gaping stupidly like a man who has been shot.

Hanaud had sprung to his feet, he stood towering above the table, his face suddenly dark with passion.

"Oh, I say all that, do I?" he thundered. "I came all the way from Paris to Dijon to preside over a little bargain in a murder case! I—Hanaud! Oh! ho! ho! I'll teach you a lesson for that! Read this!" and bending forward he thrust out the paper with the official seal. "It is the report of the analysts. Take it, I tell you, and read it!"

Waberski reached out a trembling arm, afraid to venture nearer. Even when he had the paper in his hands, they shook so he could not read it. But since he had never believed in his charge that did not matter.

"Yes," he muttered, "no doubt I have made a mistake."

Hanaud caught the word up.

"Mistake! Ah, there's a fine word! I'll show you what sort of a mistake you have made. Draw up your chair to this table in front of me! So! And take a pen—so! And a sheet of paper—so! and now you write for me a letter."

"Yes, yes," Waberski agreed. All the bravado had gone from his bearing, all the insinuating slyness. He was in a quiver from head to foot. "I will write that I am sorry."

"That is not necessary," roared Hanaud. "I will see to it that you are sorry. No! You write for me what I dictate to you and in English. You are ready? Yes? Then you begin. 'Dear Sirs.' You have that?"

"Yes, yes," said Waberski, scribbling hurriedly. His head was in a whirl. He flinched as he wrote under the towering bulk of the detective. He had as yet no comprehension of the goal to which he was being led.

"Good! 'Dear Sirs,'" Hanaud repeated. "But we want a date for that letter. April 30th, eh? That will do. The day Madame Harlowe's will was read and you found you were left no money. April 30th—put it in. So! Now we go on. 'Dear Sirs, Send me at once one thousand pounds by the recommended post, or I make some awkwardnesses——'"

Waberski dropped his pen and sprang back out of his chair.

"I don't understand—I can't write that.... There is an error—I never meant..." he stammered, his hands raised as if to ward off an attack.

"Ah, you never meant the blackmail!" Hanaud cried savagely. "Ah! Ha! Ha! It is good for you that I now know that! For when, as you put it so delicately to Mademoiselle, the moment comes for the extenuating pleas, I can rise up in the Court and urge it. Yes! I will say: 'Mr. the President, though he did the blackmail, poor fellow, he never meant it. So please to give him five years more,'" and with that Hanaud swept across the room like a tornado and flung open the door behind which Frobisher was waiting.

"Come!" he said, and he led Jim into the room. "You produce the two letters he wrote to your firm, Monsieur Frobisher. Good!"

But it was not necessary to produce them. Boris Waberski had dropped into a chair and burst into tears. There was a little movement of discomfort made by every one in that room except Hanaud; and even his anger dropped. He looked at Waberski in silence.

"You make us all ashamed. You can go back to your hotel," he said shortly. "But you will not leave Dijon, Monsieur Waberski, until it is decided what steps we shall take with you."

Waberski rose to his feet and stumbled blindly to the door.

"I make my apologies," he stammered. "It is all a mistake. I am very poor ... I meant no harm," and without looking at any one he got himself out of the room.

"That type! He at all events cannot any more think that Dijon is dull," said Hanaud, and once more he adventured on the dangerous seas of the English language. "Do you know what my friend Mister Ricardo would have said? No? I tell you. He would have said, 'That fellow! My God! What a sauce!'"

Those left in the room, Betty, Ann Upcott, and Jim Frobisher, were in a mood to welcome any excuse for laughter. The interdict upon the house was raised, the charge against Betty proved of no account, the whole bad affair was at an end. Or so it seemed. But Hanaud went quickly to the door and closed it, and when he turned back there was no laughter at all upon his face.

"Now that that man has gone," he said gravely, "I have something to tell you three which is very serious. I believe that, though Waberski does not know it, Madame Harlowe was murdered by poison in this house on the night of April the twenty-seventh."

The statement was received in a dreadful silence. Jim Frobisher stood like a man whom some calamity has stunned. Betty leaned forward in her seat with a face of horror and incredulity; and then from the arm-chair by the door where Ann Upcott was sitting there burst a loud, wild cry.

"There was some one in the house that night," she cried.

Hanaud swung round to her, his eyes blazing.

"And it is you who tell me that, Mademoiselle?" he asked in a curious, steady voice.

"Yes. It's the truth," she cried with a sort of relief in her voice, that at last a secret was out which had grown past endurance. "I am sure now. There was a stranger in the house." And though her face was white as paper, her eyes met Hanaud's without fear.

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Book

The two startling declarations, one treading upon the heels of the other, set Jim Frobisher's brain whirling. Consternation and bewilderment were all jumbled together. He had no time to ask "how," for he was already asking "What next?" His first clear thought was for Betty, and as he looked at her, a sharp anger against both Hanaud and Ann Upcott seized and shook him. Why hadn't they both spoken before? Why must they speak now? Why couldn't they leave well alone?

For Betty had fallen back in the window-seat, her hands idle at her sides and her face utterly weary and distressed. Jim thought of some stricken patient who wakes in the morning to believe for a few moments that the malady was a bad dream; and then comes the stab and the cloud of pain settles down for another day. A moment ago Betty's ordeal seemed over. Now it was beginning a new phase.

"I am sorry," he said to her.

The report of the analysts was lying on the writing-table just beneath his eyes. He took it up idly. It was a trick, of course, with its seals and its signatures, a trick of Hanaud's to force Waberski to a retraction. He glanced at it, and with an exclamation began carefully to read it through from the beginning to the end. When he had finished, he raised his head and stared at Hanaud.

"But this report is genuine," he cried. "Here are the details of the tests applied and the result. There was no trace discovered of any poison."

"No trace at all," Hanaud replied. He was not in the least disturbed by the question.

"Then I don't understand why you bring the accusation or whom you accuse," Frobisher exclaimed.

"I have accused no one," said Hanaud steadily. "Let us be clear about that! As to your other question—look!"

He took Frobisher by the elbow and led him to that bookshelf by the window before which they had stood together yesterday.

"There was an empty space here yesterday. You yourself drew my attention to it. You see that the space is filled to-day."

"Yes," said Jim.

Hanaud took down the volume which occupied the space. It was of quarto size, fairly thick and bound in a paper cover.

"Look at that," he said; and Jim Frobisher as he took it noticed with a queer little start that although Hanaud's eyes were on his face they were blank of all expression. They did not see him. Hanaud's senses were concentrated on the two girls at neither of whom he so much as glanced. He was alert to them, to any movement they might make of surprise or terror. Jim threw up his head in a sudden revolt. He was being used for another trick, as some conjurer may use a fool of a fellow whom he has persuaded out of his audience on to his platform. Jim looked at the cover of the book, and cried with enough violence to recall Hanaud's attention:

"I see nothing here to the point. It is a treatise printed by some learned society in Edinburgh."

"It is. And if you will look again, you will see that it was written by a Professor of Medicine in that University. And if you will look a third time you will see from a small inscription in ink that the copy was presented with the Professor's compliments to Mr. Simon Harlowe."

Hanaud, whilst he was speaking, went to the second of the two windows which looked upon the court and putting his head out, spoke for a little while in a low voice.

"We shall not need our sentry here any more," he said as he turned back into the room. "I have sent him upon an errand."

He went back to Jim Frobisher, who was turning over a page of the treatise here and there and was never a scrap the wiser.

"Well?" he asked.

"Strophanthus Hispidus," Jim read aloud the title of the treatise. "I can't make head or tail of it."

"Let me try!" said Hanaud, and he took the book out of Frobisher's hands. "I will show you all how I spent the half-hour whilst I was waiting for you this morning."

He sat down at the writing-table, placed the treatise on the blotting-pad in front of him and laid it open at a coloured plate.

"This is the fruit of the plant Strophanthus Hispidus, when it is ripening," he said.

The plate showed two long, tapering follicles joined together at their stems and then separating like a pair of compasses set at an acute angle. The backs of these follicles were rounded, dark in colour and speckled; the inner surfaces, however, were flat, and the curious feature of them was that, from longitudinal crevices, a number of silky white feathers protruded.

"Each of these feathers," Hanaud continued, and he looked up to find that Ann Upcott had drawn close to the table and that Betty Harlowe herself was leaning forward with a look of curiosity upon her face—"each of these feathers is attached by a fine stalk to an elliptical pod, which is the seed, and when the fruit is quite ripe and these follicles have opened so that they make a straight line, the feathers are released and the wind spreads the seed. It is wonderful, eh? See!"

Hanaud turned the pages until he came to another plate. Here a feather was represented in complete detachment from the follicle. It was outspread like a fan and was extraordinarily pretty and delicate in its texture; and from it by a stem as fine as a hair the seed hung like a jewel.

"What would you say of it, Mademoiselle?" Hanaud asked, looking up into the face of Ann Upcott with a smile. "An ornament wrought for a fine lady, by a dainty artist, eh?" and he turned the book round so that she on the opposite side of the table might the better admire the engraving.

Betty Harlowe, it seemed, was now mastered by her curiosity. Jim Frobisher, gazing down over Hanaud's shoulder at the plate and wondering uneasily whither he was being led, saw a shadow fall across the book. And there was Betty, standing by the side of her friend with the palms of her hands upon the edge of the table and her face bent over the book.

"One could wish it was an ornament, this seed of the Strophanthus Hispidus," Hanaud continued with a shake of the head. "But, alas! it is not so harmless."

He turned the book around again to himself and once more turned the pages. The smile had disappeared altogether from his face. He stopped at a third plate; and this third plate showed a row of crudely fashioned arrows with barbed heads.

Hanaud glanced up over his shoulder at Jim.

"Do you understand now the importance of this book, Monsieur Frobisher?" he asked. "No? The seeds of this plant make the famous arrow-poison of Africa. The deadliest of all the poisons since there is no antidote for it." His voice grew sombre. "The wickedest of all the poisons, since it leaves no trace."

Jim Frobisher was startled. "Is that true?" he cried.

"Yes," said Hanaud; and Betty suddenly leaned forward and pointed to the bottom of the plate.

"There is a mark there below the hilt of that arrow," she said curiously. "Yes, and a tiny note in ink."

For a moment a little gift of vision was vouchsafed to Jim Frobisher, born, no doubt, of his perplexities and trouble. A curtain was rung up in his brain. He saw no more than what was before him—the pretty group about the table in the gold of the May morning, but it was all made grim and terrible and the gold had withered to a light that was grey and deathly and cold as the grave. There were the two girls in the grace of their beauty and their youth, daintily tended, fastidiously dressed, bending their shining curls over that plate of the poison arrows like pupils at a lecture. And the man delivering the lecture, so close to them, with speech so gentle, was implacably on the trail of murder, and maybe even now looked upon one of these two girls as his quarry; was even now perhaps planning to set her in the dock of an Assize Court and send her out afterwards, carried screaming and sobbing with terror in the first grey of the morning to the hideous red engine erected during the night before the prison gates. Jim saw Hanaud the genial and friendly, as in some flawed mirror, twisted into a sinister and terrifying figure. How could he sit so close with them at the table, talk to them, point them out this and that diagram in the plates, he being human and knowing what he purposed. Jim broke in upon the lecture with a cry of exasperation.

"But this isn't a poison! This is a book about a poison. The book can't kill!"

At once Hanaud replied to him:

"Can't it?" he cried sharply. "Listen to what Mademoiselle said a minute ago. Below the hilt of this arrow marked 'Figure F,' the Professor has written a tiny note."

This particular arrow was a little different from the others in the shape of its shaft. Just below the triangular iron head the shaft expanded. It was as though the head had been fitted into a bulb; as one sees sometimes wooden penholders fine enough and tapering at the upper end, and quite thick just above the nib.

"'See page 37,'" said Hanaud, reading the Professor's note, and he turned back the pages.

"Page 37. Here we are!"

Hanaud ran a finger half-way down the page and stopped at a word in capitals.

"Figure F."

Hanaud hitched his chair a little closer to the table; Ann Upcott moved round the end of the table that she might see the better; even Jim Frobisher found himself stooping above Hanaud's shoulder. They were all conscious of a queer tension; they were expectant like explorers on the brink of a discovery. Whilst Hanaud read the paragraph aloud, it seemed that no one breathed; and this is what he read:

"'Figure F is the representation of a poison arrow which was lent to me by Simon Harlowe, Esq., of Blackman's, Norfolk, and the Maison Grenelle at Dijon. It was given to him by a Mr. John Carlisle, a trader on the Shire River in the Kombe country, and is the most perfect example of a poison arrow which I have seen. The Strophanthus seed has been pounded up in water and mixed with the reddish clay used by the Kombe natives, and the compound is thickly smeared over the head of the arrow shaft and over the actual iron dart except at the point and the edges. The arrow is quite new and the compound fresh.'"

Hanaud leaned back in his chair when he had come to the end of this paragraph.

"You see, Monsieur Frobisher, the question we have to answer. Where is to-day Simon Harlowe's arrow?"

Betty looked up into Hanaud's face.

"If it is anywhere in this house, Monsieur, it should be in the locked cabinet in my sitting-room."

"Your sitting-room?" Hanaud exclaimed sharply.

"Yes. It is what we call the Treasure Room—half museum, half living-room. My uncle Simon used it, Madame too. It was their favourite room, full of curios and beautiful things. But after Simon Harlowe died Madame would never enter it. She locked the door which communicated with her dressing-room, so that she might never even in a moment of forgetfulness enter it. The room has a door into the hall. She gave the room to me."

Hanaud's forehead cleared of its wrinkles.

"I understand," he said. "And that room is sealed."

"Yes."

"Have you ever seen the arrow, Mademoiselle?"

"Not that I remember. I only looked into the cabinet once. There are some horrible things hidden away there"; and Betty shivered and shook the recollection of them from her shoulders.

"The chances are that it's not in the house at all, that it never came back to the house," Frobisher argued stubbornly. "The Professor in all probability would have kept it."

"If he could," Hanaud rejoined. "But it's out of all probability that a collector of rare things would have allowed him to keep it. No!" and he sat for a little time in a muse. "Do you know what I am wondering?" he asked at length, and then answered his own question. "I am wondering whether after all Boris Waberski was not in the street of Gambetta on the seventh of May and close, very close, to the shop of Jean Cladel the herbalist."

"Boris! Boris Waberski," cried Jim. Was he in Hanaud's eyes the criminal? After all, why not? After all, who more likely if criminal there was, since Boris Waberski thought himself an inheritor under Mrs. Harlowe's will?

"I am wondering whether he was not doing that very thing which he attributed to you, Mademoiselle Betty," Hanaud continued.

"Paying?" Betty cried.

"Paying—or making excuses for not paying, which is more probable, or recovering the poison arrow now clean of its poison, which is most probable of all."

At last Hanaud had made an end of his secrecies and reticence. His suspicion, winged like the arrow in the plate, was flying straight to this evident mark. Jim drew a breath like a man waking from a nightmare; in all of that small company a relaxation was visible; Ann Upcott drew away from the table; Betty said softly as though speaking to herself, "Monsieur Boris! Monsieur Boris! Oh, I never thought of that!" and, to Jim's admiration there was actually a note of regret in her voice.

It was audible, too, to Hanaud, since he answered with a smile:

"But you must bring yourself to think of it, Mademoiselle. After all, he was not so gentle with you that you need show him so much good will."

A slight rush of colour tinged Betty's cheeks. Jim was not quite sure that a tiny accent of irony had not pointed Hanaud's words.

"I saw him sitting here," she replied quickly, "half an hour ago—abject—in tears—a man!" She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of distaste. "I wish him nothing worse. I was satisfied."

Hanaud smiled again with a curious amusement, an appreciation which Frobisher was quite at a loss to understand. But he had from time to time received an uneasy impression that a queer little secret duel was all this while being fought by Betty Harlowe and Hanaud underneath the smooth surface of questions and answers—a duel in which now one, now the other of the combatants got some trifling scratch. This time it seemed Betty was hurt.

"You are satisfied, Mademoiselle, but the Law is not," Hanaud returned. "Boris Waberski expected a legacy. Boris Waberski needed money immediately, as the first of the two letters which he wrote to Monsieur Frobisher's firm clearly shows. Boris Waberski had a motive." He looked from one to the other of his audience with a nod to drive the point home. "Motives, no doubt, are signposts rather difficult to read, and if one reads them amiss, they lead one very wide astray. Granted! But you must look for your signposts all the same and try to read them aright. Listen again to the Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh! He is as precise as a man can be."

Hanaud's eyes fell again upon the description of Figure F in the treatise still open upon the table in front of him.

"The arrow was the best specimen of a poison arrow which he had ever come across. The poison paste was thickly and smoothly spread over the arrow head and some inches of the shaft. The arrow was unused and the poison fresh, and these poisons retain their energy for many, many years. I tell you that if this book and this arrow were handed over to Jean Cladel, Herbalist, Jean Cladel could with ease make a solution in alcohol which injected from a hypodermic needle, would cause death within fifteen minutes and leave not one trace."

"Within fifteen minutes?" Betty asked incredulously, and from the arm-chair against the wall, where Ann Upcott had once more seated herself, there broke a startled exclamation.

"Oh!" she cried, but no one took any notice of her at all. Both Jim and Betty had their eyes fixed upon Hanaud, and he was altogether occupied in driving his argument home.

"Within fifteen minutes? How do you know?" cried Jim.

"It is written here, in the book."

"And where would Jean Cladel have learnt to handle the paste with safety, how to prepare the solution?" Jim went on.

"Here! Here! Here!" answered Hanaud, tapping with his knuckles upon the treatise. "It is all written out here—experiment after experiment made upon living animals and the action of the poison measured and registered by minutes. Oh, given a man with a working knowledge of chemicals such as Jean Cladel must possess, and the result is certain."

Betty Harlowe leaned forward again over the book and Hanaud turned it half round between them, so that both, by craning their heads, could read. He turned the pages back to the beginning and passed them quickly in review.

"See, Mademoiselle, the time tables. Strophanthus constricts the muscles of the heart like digitalis, only much more violently, much more swiftly. See the contractions of the heart noted down minute after minute, until the moment of death and all—here is the irony!—so that by means of these experiments, the poison may be transformed into a medicine and the weapon of death become an agent of life—as in good hands, it has happened." Hanaud leaned back and contemplated Betty Harlowe between his half-closed eyes. "That is wonderful, Mademoiselle. What do you think?"

Betty slowly closed the book.

"I think, Monsieur Hanaud," she said, "it is no less wonderful that you should have studied this book so thoroughly during the half-hour you waited for us here this morning."

It was Hanaud's turn to change colour. The blood mounted into his face. He was for a second or two quite disconcerted. Jim once more had a glimpse of the secret duel and rejoiced that this time it was Hanaud, the great Hanaud, who was scratched.

"The study of poisons is particularly my work," he answered shortly. "Even at the Sûrété we have to specialise nowadays," and he turned rather quickly towards Frobisher. "You are thoughtful, Monsieur?"

Jim was following out his own train of thought.

"Yes," he answered. Then he spoke to Betty.

"Boris Waberski had a latch-key, I suppose?"

"Yes," she replied.

"He took it away with him?"

"I think so."

"When are the iron gates locked?"

"It is the last thing Gaston does before he goes to bed."

Jim's satisfaction increased with every answer he received.

"You see, Monsieur Hanaud," he cried, "all this while we have been leaving out a question of importance. Who put this book back upon its shelf? And when? Yesterday at noon the space was empty. This morning it is filled. Who filled it? Last night we sat in the garden after dinner behind the house. What could have been easier than for Waberski to slip in with his latch-key at some moment when the court was empty, replace the book and slip out again unnoticed? Why——"

A gesture of Betty's brought him to a halt.

"Unnoticed? Impossible!" she said bitterly. "The police have a sergent-de-ville at our gates, night and day."

Hanaud shook his head.

"He is there no longer. After you were good enough to answer me so frankly yesterday morning the questions it was my duty to put to you, I had him removed at once."

"Why, that's true," Jim exclaimed joyfully. He remembered now that when he had driven up with his luggage from the hotel in the afternoon, the street of Charles-Robert had been quite empty. Betty Harlowe stood taken aback by her surprise. Then a smile made her face friendly; her eyes danced to the smile, and she dipped to the detective a little mock curtsy. But her voice was warm with gratitude.

"I thank you, Monsieur. I did not notice yesterday that the man had been removed, or I should have thanked you before. Indeed I was not looking for so much consideration at your hands. As I told my friend Jim, I believed that you went away thinking me guilty."

Hanaud raised a hand in protest. To Jim it was the flourish of the sword with which the duellist saluted at the end of the bout. The little secret combat between these two was over. Hanaud, by removing the sergeant from before the gates, had given a sign surely not only to Betty but to all Dijon that he found nothing to justify any surveillance of her goings out and comings in, or any limitations upon her freedom.

"Then you see," Jim insisted. He was still worrying at his solution of the case like a dog with a bone. "You see Waberski had the road clear for him last night."

Betty, however, would not have it. She shook her head vigorously.

"I won't believe that Monsieur Boris is guilty of so horrible a murder. More," and she turned her great eyes pleadingly upon Hanaud, "I don't believe that any murder was committed here at all. I don't want to believe it," and for a moment her voice faltered.

"After all, Monsieur Hanaud, what are you building this dreadful theory upon? That a book of my Uncle Simon was not in his library yesterday and is there to-day. We know nothing more. We don't know even whether Jean Cladel exists at all."

"We shall know that, Mademoiselle, very soon," said Hanaud, staring down at the book upon the table.

"We don't know whether the arrow is in the house, whether it ever was."

"We must make sure, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud stubbornly.

"And even if you had it now, here with the poison clinging in shreds to the shaft, you still couldn't be sure that the rest of it had been used. Here is a report, Monsieur, from the doctors. Because it says that no trace of the poison can be discovered, you can't infer that a poison was administered which leaves no trace. You never can prove it. You have nothing to go upon. It's all guesswork, and guesswork which will keep us living in a nightmare. Oh, if I thought for a moment that murder had been committed, I'd say, 'Go on, go on'! But it hasn't. Oh, it hasn't!"

Betty's voice rang with so evident a sincerity, there was so strong a passion of appeal, for peace, for an end of suspicion, for a right to forget and be forgotten, that Jim fancied no man could resist it. Indeed, Hanaud sat for a long while with his eyes bent upon the table before he answered her. But when at last he did, gently though his voice began, Jim knew at once that she had lost.

"You argue and plead very well, Mademoiselle Betty," he said. "But we have each of us our little creeds by which we live for better or for worse. Here is mine, a very humble one. I can discover extenuations in most crimes: even crimes of violence. Passion, anger, even greed! What are they but good qualities developed beyond the bounds? Things at the beginning good and since grown monstrous! So, too, in the execution. This or that habit of life makes natural this or that weapon which to us is hideous and abnormal and its mere use a sign of a dreadful depravity. Yes, I recognise these palliations. But there is one crime I never will forgive—murder by poison. And one criminal in whose pursuit I will never tire nor slacken, the Poisoner." Through the words there ran a real thrill of hatred, and though Hanaud's voice was low, and he never once raised his eyes from the table, he held the three who listened to him in a dreadful spell.

"Cowardly and secret, the poisoner has his little world at his mercy, and a fine sort of mercy he shows to be sure," he continued bitterly. "His hideous work is so easy. It just becomes a vice like drink, no more than that to the poisoner, but with a thousand times the pleasure drink can give. Like the practice of some abominable art. I tell you the truth now! Show me one victim to-day and the poisoner scot-free, and I'll show you another victim before the year's out. Make no mistake! Make no mistake!"

His voice rang out and died away. But the words seemed still to vibrate in the air of that room, to strike the walls and rebound from them and still be audible. Jim Frobisher, for all his slow imagination, felt that had a poisoner been present and heard them, some cry of guilt must have rent the silence and betrayed him. His heart stopped in its beats listening for a cry, though his reason told him there was no mouth in that room from which the cry could come.

Hanaud looked up at Betty when he had finished. He begged her pardon with a little flutter of his hands and a regretful smile. "You must take me, therefore, as God made me, Mademoiselle, and not blame me more than you can help for the distress I still must cause you. There was never a case more difficult. Therefore never one about which one way or the other I must be more sure."

Before Betty could reply there came a knock upon the door.

"Come in," Hanaud cried out, and a small, dark, alert man in plain clothes entered the room.

"This is Nicolas Moreau, who was keeping watch in the courtyard. I sent him some while ago upon an errand," he explained and turned again to Moreau.

"Well, Nicolas?"

Nicolas stood at attention, with his hands at the seams of his trousers, in spite of his plain clothes, and he recited rather than spoke in a perfectly expressionless official voice.

"In accordance with instructions I went to the shop of Jean Cladel. It is number seven. From the Rue Gambetta I went to the Prefecture. I verified your statement. Jean Cladel has twice appeared before the Police Correctionelle for selling forbidden drugs and has twice been acquitted owing to the absence of necessary witnesses."

"Thank you, Nicolas."

Moreau saluted, turned on his heel, and went out of the room. There followed a moment of silence, of discouragement. Hanaud looked ruefully at Betty.

"You see! I must go on. We must search in that locked cabinet of Simon Harlowe's for the poison arrow, if by chance it should be there."

"The room is sealed," Frobisher reminded him.

"We must have those seals removed," he replied, and he took his watch from his pocket and screwed up his face in grimace.

"We need Monsieur the Commissary, and Monsieur the Commissary will not be in a good humour if we disturb him now. For it is twelve o'clock, the sacred hour of luncheon. You will have observed upon the stage that Commissaries of Police are never in a good humour. It is because——" But Hanaud's audience was never to hear his explanation of this well-known fact. For he stopped with a queer jerk of his voice, his watch still dangling from his fingers upon its chain. Both Jim and Betty looked at once where he was looking. They saw Ann Upcott standing up against the wall with her hand upon the top rail of a chair to prevent herself from falling. Her eyes were closed, her whole face a mask of misery. Hanaud was at her side in a moment.

"Mademoiselle," he asked with a breathless sort of eagerness, "what is it you have to tell me?"

"It is true, then?" she whispered. "Jean Cladel exists?"

"Yes."

"And the poison arrow could have been used?" she faltered, and the next words would not be spoken, but were spoken at the last. "And death would have followed in fifteen minutes?"

"Upon my oath it is true," Hanaud insisted. "What is it you have to tell me?"

"That I could have hindered it all. I shall never forgive myself. I could have hindered the murder."

Hanaud's eyes narrowed as he watched the girl. Was he disappointed, Frobisher wondered? Did he expect quite another reply? A swift movement by Betty distracted him from these questions. He saw Betty looking across the room at them with the strangest glittering eyes he had ever seen. And then Ann Upcott drew herself away from Hanaud and stood up against the wall at her full height with her arms outstretched. She seemed to be setting herself apart as a pariah; her whole attitude and posture cried, "Stone me! I am waiting."

Hanaud put his watch into his pocket.

"Mademoiselle, we will let the Commissary eat his luncheon in peace, and we will hear your story first. But not here. In the garden under the shade of the trees." He took his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. "Indeed I too feel the heat. This room is as hot as an oven."

When Jim Frobisher looked back in after time upon the incidents of that morning, nothing stood out so vividly in his memories, no, not even the book of arrows and its plates, not Hanaud's statement of his creed, as the picture of him twirling his watch at the end of his chain, whilst it sparkled in the sunlight and he wondered whether he should break in now upon the Commissaire of Police or let him eat his luncheon in quiet. So much that was then unsuspected by them all, hung upon the exact sequence of events.

CHAPTER NINE: The Secret

The garden chairs were already set out upon a lawn towards the farther end of the garden in the shadow of the great trees. Hanaud led the way towards them.

"We shall be in the cool here and with no one to overhear us but the birds," he said, and he patted and arranged the cushions in a deep arm-chair of basket work for Ann Upcott. Jim Frobisher was reminded again of the solicitude of a doctor with an invalid and again the parallel jarred upon him. But he was getting a clearer insight into the character of this implacable being. The little courtesies and attentions were not assumed. They were natural, but they would not hinder him for a moment in his pursuit. He would arrange the cushions with the swift deft hands of a nurse—yes, but he would slip the handcuffs on the wrists of his invalid, a moment afterwards, no less deftly and swiftly, if thus his duty prompted him.