CHAPTER ONE: Letters of Mark (continued 5)

Hanaud went over to the cabinet and, using his skeleton keys, again opened its doors. On the shelves were ranged a glass jar or two, a retort, the simplest utensils of a laboratory and a few bottles, one of which, larger than the rest, was half filled with a colourless liquid.

"Alcohol," said Hanaud, pointing to the label.

Jim Frobisher moved carefully round on the outskirts of the room, taking care not to alter the disarrangements of the furniture. He looked the bottles over. Not one of them held a drop of that pale lemon-coloured solution which the Professor, in his Treatise, had described. Hanaud shut and locked the doors of the cabinet again and stepped carefully over to the bureau. It stood open, and a few papers were strewn upon the flap. He sat down at the bureau and began carefully to search it. Jim sat down in a chair. Somehow it had leaked out that, since this morning, Hanaud knew of Jean Cladel. Jean Cladel therefore must be stopped from any revelations; and he had been stopped. Frobisher could no longer doubt that murder had been done on the night of April the 27th, in the Maison Grenelle. Development followed too logically upon development. The case was building itself up—another storey had been added to the edifice with this new crime. Yes, certainly and solidly it was building itself up—this case against some one.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The White Tablet

Within the minute that case was to be immeasurably strengthened. An exclamation broke from Hanaud. He sprang to his feet and turned on the light of a green-shaded reading lamp, which stood upon the ledge of the bureau. He was holding now under the light a small drawer, which he had removed from the front of the bureau. Very gingerly he lifted some little thing out of it, something that looked like a badge that men wear in their buttonholes. He laid it down upon the blotting paper; and in that room of death laughed harshly.

He beckoned to Jim.

"Come and look!"

What Jim saw was a thin, small, barbed iron dart, with an iron stem. He had no need to ask its nature, for he had seen its likeness that morning in the Treatise of the Edinburgh Professor. This was the actual head of Simon Harlowe's poison-arrow.

"You have found it!" said Jim in a voice that shook.

"Yes."

Hanaud gave it a little push, and said thoughtfully:

"A negro thousands of miles away sits outside his hut in the Kombe country and pounds up his poison seed and mixes it with red clay, and smears it thick and slab over the shaft of his fine new arrow, and waits for his enemy. But his enemy does not come. So he barters it, or gives it to his white friend the trader on the Shire river. And the trader brings it home and gives it to Simon Harlowe of the Maison Grenelle. And Simon Harlowe lends it to a professor in Edinburgh, who writes about it in a printed book and sends it back again. And in the end, after all its travels, it comes to the tenement of Jean Cladel in a slum of Dijon, and is made ready in a new way to do its deadly work."

For how much longer Hanaud would have moralised over the arrow in this deplorable way, no man can tell. Happily Jim Frobisher was reprieved from listening to him by the shutting of a door below and the noise of voices in the passage.

"The Commissary!" said Hanaud, and he went quickly down the stairs.

Jim heard him speaking in a low tone for quite a long while, and no doubt was explaining the position of affairs. For when he brought the Commissary and the doctor up into the room he introduced Jim as one about whom they already knew.

"This is that Monsieur Frobisher," he said.

The Commissary, a younger and more vivacious man than Girardot, bowed briskly to Jim and looked towards the contorted figure of Jean Cladel.

Even he could not restrain a little gesture of repulsion. He clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

"He is not pretty, that one!" he said. "Most certainly he is not pretty."

Hanaud crossed again to the bureau and carefully folded the dart around with paper.

"With your permission, Monsieur," he said ceremoniously to the Commissary, "I shall take this with me. I will be responsible for it." He put it away in his pocket and looked at the doctor, who was stooping by the side of Jean Cladel. "I do not wish to interfere, but I should be glad to have a copy of the medical report. I think that it might help me. I think it will be found that this murder was committed in a way peculiar to one man."

"Certainly you shall have a copy of the report, Monsieur Hanaud," replied the young Commissary in a polite and formal voice.

Hanaud laid a hand on Jim's arm.

"We are in the way, my friend. Oh, yes, in spite of Monsieur le Commissaire's friendly protestations. This is not our affair. Let us go!" He conducted Jim to the door and turned about. "I do not wish to interfere," he repeated, "but it is possible that the shutters and the window will bear the traces of the murderer's fingers. I don't think it probable, for that animal had taken his precautions. But it is possible, for he left in a great hurry."

The Commissary was overwhelmed with gratitude.

"Most certainly we will give our attention to the shutters and the window-sill."

"A copy of the finger-prints, if any are found?" Hanaud suggested.

"Shall be at Monsieur Hanaud's disposal as early as possible," the Commissary agreed.

Jim experienced a pang of regret that Monsieur Bex was not present at the little exchange of civilities. The Commissary and Hanaud were so careful not to tread upon one another's toes and so politely determined that their own should not be trodden upon. Monsieur Bex could not but have revelled in the correctness of their deportment.

Hanaud and Frobisher went downstairs into the street. The neighbourhood had not been aroused. A couple of sergents-de-ville stood in front of the door. The street of Gambetta was still asleep and indifferent to the crime which had taken place in one of its least respectable houses.

"I shall go to the Prefecture," said Hanaud. "They have given me a little office there with a sofa. I want to put away the arrow head before I go to my hotel."

"I shall come with you," said Jim. "It will be a relief to walk for a little in the fresh air, after that room."

The Prefecture lay the better part of a mile away across the city. Hanaud set off at a great pace, and reaching the building conducted Jim into an office with a safe set against the wall.

"Will you sit down for a moment? And smoke, please," he said.

He was in a mood of such deep dejection; he was so changed from his mercurial self; that only now did Jim Frobisher understand the great store he had set upon his interview with Jean Cladel. He unlocked the safe and brought over to the table a few envelopes of different sizes, the copy of the Treatise and his green file. He seated himself in front of Jim and began to open his envelopes and range their contents in a row, when the door was opened and a gendarme saluted and advanced. He carried a paper in his hand.

"A reply came over the telephone from Paris at nine o'clock to-night, Monsieur Hanaud. They say that this may be the name of the firm you want. It was established in the Rue de Batignolles, but it ceased to exist seven years ago."

"Yes, that would have happened," Hanaud answered glumly, as he took the paper. He read what was written upon it. "Yes—yes. That's it. Not a doubt."

He took an envelope from a rack upon the table and put the paper inside it and stuck down the flap. On the front of the envelope, Jim saw him write an illuminating word. "Address."

Then he looked at Jim with smouldering eyes.

"There is a fatality in all this," he cried. "We become more and more certain that murder was committed and how it was committed. We get a glimpse of possible reasons why. But we are never an inch nearer to evidence—real convincing evidence—who committed it. Fatality? I am a fool to use such words. It's keen wits and audacity and nerve that stop us at the end of each lane and make an idiot of me!"

He struck a match viciously and lit a cigarette. Frobisher made an effort to console him.

"Yes, but it's the keen wits and the audacity and the nerve of more than one person."

Hanaud glanced at Frobisher sharply.

"Explain, my friend."

"I have been thinking over it ever since we left the street of Gambetta. I no longer doubt that Mrs. Harlowe was murdered in the Maison Grenelle. It is impossible to doubt it. But her murder was part of the activities of a gang. Else how comes it that Jean Cladel was murdered too to-night?"

A smile drove for a moment the gloom from Hanaud's face.

"Yes. You have been quite fifteen minutes in the bull-ring," he said.

"Then you agree with me?"

"Yes!" But Hanaud's gloom had returned. "But we can't lay our hands upon the gang. We are losing time, and I am afraid that we have no time to lose." Hanaud shivered like a man suddenly chilled. "Yes, I am very troubled now. I am very—frightened."

His fear peered out of him and entered into Frobisher. Frobisher did not understand it, he had no clue to what it was that Hanaud feared, but sitting in that brightly-lit office in the silent building, he was conscious of evil presences thronging about the pair of them, presences grotesque and malevolent such as some old craftsman of Dijon might have carved on the pillars of a cathedral. He, too, shivered.

"Let us see, now!" said Hanaud.

He took the end of the arrow shaft from one envelope, and the barb from his pocket, and fitted them together. The iron barb was loose now because the hole to receive it at the top of the arrow shaft had been widened to take a nib. But the spoke was just about the right length. He laid the arrow down upon the table, and opened his green file. A small square envelope, such as chemists use, attracted Jim's notice. He took it up. It seemed empty, but as he shook it out, a square tablet of some hard white substance rolled on to the table. It was soiled with dust, and there was a smear of green upon it; and as Jim turned it over, he noticed a cut or crack in its surface, as though something sharp had struck it.

"What in the world has this to do with the affair?" he asked.

Hanaud looked up from his file. He reached out his hand swiftly to take the tablet away from Jim, and drew his hand in again.

"A good deal perhaps. Perhaps nothing," he said gravely. "But it is interesting—that tablet. I shall know more about it to-morrow."

Jim could not for the life of him remember any occasion which had brought this tablet into notice. It certainly had not been discovered in Jean Cladel's house, for it was already there in the safe in the office. Jim had noticed the little square envelope as Hanaud fetched it out of the safe. The tablet looked as if it had been picked up from the road like Monsieur Bex's famous match-box. Or—yes, there was that smear of green—from the grass. Jim sat up straight in his chair. They had all been together in the garden this morning. Hanaud, himself, Betty and Ann Upcott. But at that point Frobisher's conjectures halted. Neither his memory nor deduction could connect that tablet with the half-hour the four of them had passed in the shade of the sycamores. The only thing of which he was quite sure was the great importance which Hanaud attached to it. For all the time that he handled and examined it Hanaud's eyes never left him, never once. They followed each little movement of finger tip and thumb with an extraordinary alertness, and when Jim at last tilted it off his palm back into its little envelope, the detective undoubtedly drew a breath of relief.

Jim Frobisher laughed good-humouredly. He was getting to know his man. He did not invite any "Aha's" and "Oho's" by vain questionings. He leaned across the table and took up his own memorandum which Hanaud had just laid aside out of his file. He laid it on the table in front of him and added two new questions to those which he had already written out. Thus:

(5) What was the exact message telephoned from Paris to the Prefecture and hidden away in an envelope marked by Hanaud: "Address"?

(6) When and where and why was the white tablet picked up, and what, in the name of all the saints, does it mean?

With another laugh Frobisher tossed the memorandum back to Hanaud. Hanaud, however, read them slowly and thoughtfully. "I had hoped to answer all your questions to-night," he said dispiritedly. "But you see! We break down at every corner, and the question must wait."

He was fitting methodically the memorandum back into the file when a look of extreme surprise came over Frobisher's face. He pointed a finger at the file.

"That telegram!"

There was a telegram pinned to the three anonymous letters which Hanaud had in the file—the two which Hanaud had shown to Frobisher in Paris and the third which Betty Harlowe had given to him that very afternoon. And the telegram was pieced together by two strips of stamp-paper in a cross.

"That's our telegram. The telegram sent to my firm by Miss Harlowe on Monday—yes, by George, this last Monday."

It quite took Jim's breath away, so crowded had his days been with fears and reliefs, excitements and doubts, discoveries and disappointments, to realise that this was only the Friday night; that at so recent a date as Wednesday he had never seen or spoken with Betty Harlowe. "The telegram announcing to us in London that you were engaged upon the case."

Hanaud nodded in assent.

"Yes. You gave it to me."

"And you tore it up."

"I did. But I picked it out of the waste-paper basket afterwards and stuck it together." Hanaud explained, in no wise disconcerted by Jim Frobisher's attack of perspicacity. "I meant to make some trouble here with the Police for letting out the secret. I am very glad now that I did pick it out. You yourself must have realised its importance the very next morning before I even arrived at the Maison Grenelle, when you told Mademoiselle that you had shown it to me."

Jim cast his memory back. He had a passion for precision and exactness which was very proper in one of his profession.

"It was not until you came that I learnt Miss Harlowe had the news by an anonymous letter," he said.

"Well, that doesn't matter," Hanaud interposed a trifle quickly. "The point of importance to me is that when the case is done with, and I have a little time to devote to these letters, the telegram may be of value."

"Yes, I see," said Jim. "I see that," he repeated, and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair; and opened his mouth and closed it again; and remained suspended between speech and silence, whilst Hanaud read through his file and contemplated his exhibits and found no hope in them.

"They lead me nowhere!" he cried violently; and Jim Frobisher made up his mind.

"Monsieur Hanaud, you do not share your thoughts with me," he said rather formally, "but I will deal with you in a better way; apart from this crime in the Maison Grenelle, you have the mystery of these anonymous letters to solve. I can help you to this extent. Another of them has been received."

"When?"

"To-night, whilst we sat at dinner."

"By whom?"

"Ann Upcott."

"What!"

Hanaud was out of his chair with a cry, towering up, his face white as the walls of the room, his eyes burning upon Frobisher. Never could news have been so unexpected, so startling.

"You are sure?" he asked.

"Quite. It came by the evening post—with others. Gaston brought them into the dining-room. There was one for me from my firm in London, a couple for Betty, and this one for Ann Upcott. She opened it with a frown, as though she did not know from whom it came. I saw it as she unfolded it. It was on the same common paper—typewritten in the same way—with no address at the head of it. She gasped as she looked at it, and then she read it again. And then with a smile she folded it and put it away."

"With a smile?" Hanaud insisted.

"Yes. She was pleased. The colour came into her face. The distress went out of it."

"She didn't show it to you, then?"

"No."

"Nor to Mademoiselle Harlowe?"

"No."

"But she was pleased, eh?" It seemed that to Hanaud this was the most extraordinary feature of the whole business. "Did she say anything?"

"Yes," answered Jim. "She said 'He has been always right, hasn't he?'"

"She said that! 'He has been always right, hasn't he?'" Hanaud slowly resumed his seat, and sat like a man turned into stone. He looked up in a little while.

"What happened then?" he asked.

"Nothing until dinner was over. Then she picked up her letter and beckoned with her head to Miss Betty, who said to me: 'We shall have to leave you to take your coffee alone.' They went across the hall to Betty's room. The treasure-room. I was a little nettled. Ever since I have been in Dijon one person after another has pushed me into a corner with orders to keep quiet and not interfere. So I came to find you at the Grande Taverne."

At another moment Jim's eruption of injured vanity would have provoked Hanaud to one of his lamentable exhibitions, but now he did not notice it at all.

"They went away to talk that letter over together," said Hanaud. "And that young lady was pleased, she who was so distressed this afternoon. A way out, then!" Hanaud was discussing his problem with himself, his eyes upon the table. "For once the Scourge is kind? I wonder! It baffles me!" He rose to his feet and walked once or twice across the room. "Yes, I the old bull of a hundred corridas, I, Hanaud, am baffled!"

He was not posturing now. He was frankly and simply amazed that he could be so utterly at a loss. Then, with a swift change of mood, he came back to the table.

"Meanwhile, Monsieur, until I can explain this strange new incident to myself, I beg of you your help," he pleaded very earnestly and even very humbly. Fear had returned to his eyes and his voice. He was disturbed beyond Jim's comprehension. "There is nothing more important. I want you—how shall I put it so that I may persuade you? I want you to stay as much as you can in the Maison Grenelle—to—yes—to keep a little watch on this pretty Ann Upcott, to——"

He got no further with his proposal. Jim Frobisher interrupted him in a very passion of anger.

"No, no, I won't," he cried. "You go much too far, Monsieur. I won't be your spy. I am not here for that. I am here for my client. As for Ann Upcott, she is my countrywoman. I will not help you against her. So help me God, I won't!"

Hanaud looked across the table at the flushed and angry face of his "junior colleague," who now resigned his office and, without parley, accepted his defeat.

"I don't blame you," he answered quietly. "I could, indeed, hope for no other reply. I must be quick, that's all. I must be very quick!"

Frobisher's anger fell away from him like a cloak one drops. He saw Hanaud sitting over against him with a white, desperately troubled face and eyes in which there shone unmistakeably some gleam of terror.

"Tell me!" he cried in an exasperation. "Be frank with me for once! Is Ann Upcott guilty? She's not alone, of course, anyway. There's a gang. We're agreed upon that. Waberski's one of them, of course? Is Ann Upcott another? Do you believe it?"

Hanaud slowly put his exhibits together. There was a struggle going on within him. The strain of the night had told upon them both, and he was tempted for once to make a confidant, tempted intolerably. On the other hand, Jim Frobisher read in him all the traditions of his service; to wait upon facts, not to utter suspicions; to be fair. It was not until he had locked everything away again in the safe that Hanaud yielded to the temptation. And even then he could not bring himself to be direct.

"You want to know what I believe of Ann Upcott?" he cried reluctantly, as though the words were torn from him. "Go to-morrow to the Church of Notre Dame and look at the façade. There, since you are not blind, you will see."

He would say no more; that was clear. Nay, he stood moodily before Frobisher, already regretting that he had said so much. Frobisher picked up his hat and stick.

"Thank you," he said. "Good night."

Hanaud let him go to the door. Then he said:

"You are free to-morrow. I shall not go to the Maison Grenelle. Have you any plans?"

"Yes. I am to be taken for a motor-drive round the neighbourhood."

"Yes. It is worth while," Hanaud answered listlessly. "But remember to telephone to me before you go. I shall be here. I will tell you if I have any news. Good night."

Jim Frobisher left him standing in the middle of the room. Before he had closed the door Hanaud had forgotten his presence. For he was saying to himself over and over again, almost with an accent of despair: "I must be quick! I must be very quick!"

Frobisher walked briskly down to the Place Ernest Renan and the Rue de la Liberté, dwelling upon Hanaud's injunction to examine the façade of Notre Dame. He must keep that in mind and obey it in the morning. But that night was not yet over for him.

As he reached the mouth of the little street of Charles-Robert he heard a light, quick step a little way behind him—a step that seemed familiar. So when he turned into the street he sauntered and looked round. He saw a tall man cross the entrance of the street very quickly and disappear between, the houses on the opposite side. The man paused for a second under the light of a street lamp at the angle of the street, and Jim could have sworn that it was Hanaud. There were no hotels, no lodgings in this quarter of the city. It was a quarter of private houses. What was Hanaud seeking there?

Speculating upon this new question, he forgot the façade of Notre Dame; and upon his arrival at the Maison Grenelle a little incident occurred which made the probability that he would soon remember it remote. He let himself into the house with a latchkey which had been given to him, and turned on the light in the hall by means of a switch at the side of the door. He crossed the hall to the foot of the stairs, and was about to turn off the light, using the switch there to which Ann Upcott had referred, when the door of the treasure-room opened. Betty appeared in the doorway.

"You are still up?" he said in a low voice, half pleased to find her still afoot and half regretful that she was losing her hours of sleep.

"Yes," and slowly her face softened to a smile. "I waited up for my lodger."

She held the door open, and he followed her back into the room.

"Let me look at you," she said, and having looked, she added: "Jim, something has happened to-night."

Jim nodded.

"What?" she asked.

"Let it wait till to-morrow, Betty!"

Betty smiled no longer. The light died out of her dark, haunting eyes. Lassitude and distress veiled them.

"Something terrible, then?" she said in a whisper.

"Yes," and she stretched out a hand to the back of a chair and steadied herself.

"Please tell me, now, Jim! I shall not sleep to-night unless you do; and oh, I am so tired!"

There was so deep a longing in her voice, so utter a weariness in the pose of her young body that Jim could not but yield.

"I'll tell you, Betty," he said gently. "Hanaud and I went to find Jean Cladel to-night. We found him dead. He had been murdered—cruelly."

Betty moaned and swayed upon her feet. She would have fallen had not Jim caught her in his arms.

"Betty!" he cried.

Betty buried her face upon his shoulder. He could feel the heave of her bosom against his heart.

"It's appalling!" she moaned. "Jean Cladel! ... No one ever had heard of him till this morning ... and now he's swept into this horror—like the rest of us! Oh, where will it end?"

Jim placed her in a chair and dropped on his knees beside her.

She was sobbing now, and he tried to lift her face up to his.

"My dear!" he whispered.

But she would not raise her head.

"No," she said in a stifled voice, "no," and she pressed her face deeper into the crook of his shoulder and clung to him with desperate hands.

"Betty!" he repeated, "I am so sorry.... But it'll all come right. I'm sure it will. Oh, Betty!" And whilst he spoke he cursed himself for the banality of his words. Why couldn't he find some ideas that were really fine with which to comfort her? Something better than these stupid commonplaces of "I am sorry" and "It will all straighten out"? But he couldn't, and it seemed that there was no necessity that he should. For her arms crept round his neck and held him close.

CHAPTER NINETEEN: A Plan Frustrated

The road curled like a paper ribbon round the shoulder of a hill and dropped into a shallow valley. To the left a little below the level of the road, a stream ran swiftly through a narrow meadow of lush green grass. Beyond the meadow the wall of the valley rose rough with outcroppings of rock, and with every tuft of its herbage already brown from the sun. On the right the northern wall rose almost from the road's edge. The valley was long and curved slowly, and half-way along to the point where it disappeared a secondary road, the sort of road which is indicated in the motorist's hand-books by a dotted line, branched off to the left, crossed the stream by a stone bridge and vanished in a cleft of the southern wall. Beyond this branching road grew trees. The stream disappeared under them as though it ran into a cavern; the slopes on either side were hidden behind trees—trees so thick that here at this end the valley looked bare in the strong sunlight, but low trees, as if they had determined to harmonise with their environment. Indeed, the whole valley had a sort of doll's-house effect—it was so shallow and narrow and stunted. It tried to be a valley and succeeded in being a depression.

When the little two-seater car swooped round the shoulder of the hill and descended, the white ribbon of road was empty but for one tiny speck at the far end, behind which a stream of dust spurted and spread like smoke from the funnel of an engine.

"That motor dust is going to smother us when we pass," said Jim.

"We shall do as much for him," said Betty, looking over her shoulder from the steering wheel. "No, worse!" Behind the car the dust was a screen. "But I don't mind, do you, Jim?" she asked with a laugh, in which for the first time, with a heart of thankfulness, Jim heard a note of gaiety. "To be free of that town if only for an hour! Oh!" and Betty opened her lungs to the sunlight and the air. "This is my first hour of liberty for a week!"

Frobisher was glad, too, to be out upon the slopes of the Côte-d'Or. The city of Dijon was ringing that morning with the murder of Jean Cladel; you could not pass down a street but you heard his name mentioned and some sarcasms about the police. He wished to forget that nightmare of a visit to the street of Gambetta and the dreadful twisted figure on the floor of the back room.

"You'll be leaving it for good very soon, Betty," he said significantly.

Betty made a little grimace at him, and laid her hand upon his sleeve.

"Jim!" she said, and the colour rose into her face, and the car swerved across the road. "You mustn't speak like that to the girl at the wheel," she said with a laugh as she switched the car back into its course, "or I shall run down the motor-cyclist and that young lady in the side-car."

"The young lady," said Jim, "happens to be a port-manteau!"

The motor-cyclist, indeed, was slowing down as he came nearer to the branching road, like a tourist unacquainted with the country, and when he actually reached it he stopped altogether and dismounted. Betty brought her car to a standstill beside him, and glanced at the clock and the speedometer in front of her.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

The man standing beside the motor-cycle was a young man, slim, dark, and of a pleasant countenance. He took off his helmet and bowed politely.

"Madame, I am looking for Dijon," he said in a harsh accent which struck Frobisher as somehow familiar to his ears.

"Monsieur, you can see the tip of it through that gap across the valley," Betty returned. In the very centre of the cleft the point of the soaring spire of the cathedral stood up like a delicate lance. "But I warn you that that way, though short, is not good."

Through the gradually thinning cloud of dust which hung behind the car they heard the jug-jug of another motor-cycle.

"The road by which we have come is the better one," she continued.

"But how far is it?" the young man asked.

Betty once more consulted her speedometer.

"Forty kilometres, and we have covered them in forty minutes, so that you can see the going is good. We started at eleven punctually, and it is now twenty minutes to twelve."

"Surely we started before eleven?" Jim interposed.

"Yes, but we stopped for a minute or two to tighten the strap of the tool-box on the edge of the town. And we started from there at eleven."

The motor-cyclist consulted his wrist-watch.

"Yes, it's twenty minutes to twelve now," he said. "But forty kilometres! I doubt if I have the essence. I think I must try the nearer road."

The second motor-cycle came out of the dust like a boat out of a sea mist and slowed down in turn at the side of them. The rider jumped out of his saddle, pushed his goggles up on to his forehead and joined in the conversation.

"That little road, Monsieur. It is not one of the national highways. That shows itself at a glance. But it is not so bad. From the stone bridge one can be at the Hôtel de Ville of Dijon in twenty-five minutes."

"I thank you," said the young man. "You will pardon me. I have been here for seven minutes, and I am expected."

He replaced his helmet, mounted his machine, and with a splutter and half a dozen explosions ran down into the bed of the valley.

The second cyclist readjusted his goggles.

"Will you go first, Madame?" he suggested. "Otherwise I give you my dust."

"Thank you!" said Betty with a smile, and she slipped in the clutch and started.

Beyond the little forest and the curve the ground rose and the valley flattened out. Across their road a broad highway set with kilometre stones ran north and south.

"The road to Paris," said Betty as she stopped the car in front of a little inn with a tangled garden at the angle. She looked along the road Pariswards. "Air!" she said, and drew a breath of longing, whilst her eyes kindled and her white strong teeth clicked as though she was biting a sweet fruit.

"Soon, Betty," said Jim. "Very soon!"

Betty drove the car into a little yard at the side of the river.

"We will lunch here, in the garden," she said, "all amongst the earwigs and the roses."

An omelet, a cutlet perfectly cooked and piping hot, with a salad and a bottle of Clos du Prince of the 1904 vintage brought the glowing city of Paris immeasurably nearer to them. They sat in the open under the shade of a tall hedge; they had the tangled garden to themselves; they laughed and made merry in the golden May, and visions of wonder trembled and opened before Jim Frobisher's eyes.

Betty swept them away, however, when he had lit a cigar and she a cigarette; and their coffee steamed from the little cups in front of them.

"Let us be practical, Jim," she said. "I want to talk to you."

The sparkle of gaiety had left her face.

"Yes!" he asked.

"About Ann." Her eyes swept round and rested on Jim's face. "She ought to go."

"Run away!" cried Jim with a start.

"Yes, at once and as secretly as possible."

Jim turned the proposal over in his mind whilst Betty waited in suspense.

"It couldn't be managed," he objected.

"It could."

"Even if it could, would she consent?"

"She does."

"Of course it's pleading guilty," he said slowly.

"Oh, it isn't, Jim. She wants time, that's all. Time for my necklace to be traced, time for the murderer of Jean Cladel to be discovered. You remember what I told you about Hanaud? He must have his victim. You wouldn't believe me, but it's true. He has got to go back to Paris and say, 'You see, they sent from Dijon for me, and five minutes! That's all I needed! Five little minutes and there's your murderess, all tied up and safe!' He tried to fix it on me first."

"No."

"He did, Jim. And now that has failed he has turned on Ann. She'll have to go. Since he can't get me he'll take my friend—yes, and manufacture the evidence into the bargain."

"Betty! Hanaud wouldn't do that!" Frobisher protested.

"But, Jim, he has done it," she said.

"When?"

"When he put that Edinburgh man's book about the arrow poison back upon the bookshelf in the library."

Jim was utterly taken back.

"Did you know that he had done that?"

"I couldn't help knowing," she answered. "The moment he took the book down it was clear to me. He knew it from end to end, as if it was a primer. He could put his finger on the plates, on the history of my uncle's arrow, on the effect of the poison, on the solution that could be made of it in an instant. He pretended that he had learnt all that in the half-hour he waited for us. It wasn't possible. He had found that book the afternoon before somewhere and had taken it away with him secretly and sat up half the night over it. That's what he had done."

Jim Frobisher was sunk in confusion. He had been guessing first this person, then that, and in the end had had to be told the truth; whereas Betty had reached it in a flash by using her wits. He felt that he had been just one minute and a half in the bull-ring.

Betty added in a hot scorn:

"Then when he had learnt it all up by heart he puts it back secretly in the bookshelf and accuses us."

"But he admits he put it back," said Jim slowly.

Betty was startled.

"When did he admit it?"

"Last night. To me," replied Jim, and Betty laughed bitterly. She would hear no good of Hanaud.

"Yes, now that he has something better to go upon."

"Something better?"

"The disappearance of my necklace. Oh, Jim, Ann has got to go. If she could get to England they couldn't bring her back, could they? They haven't evidence enough. It's only suspicion and suspicion and suspicion. But here in France it's different, isn't it? They can hold people on suspicion, keep them shut up by themselves and question them again and again. Oh, yesterday afternoon in the hall—don't you remember, Jim?—I thought Hanaud was going to arrest her there and then."

Jim Frobisher nodded.

"I thought so, too."

He had been a little shocked by Betty's proposal, but the more familiar he became with it, the more it appealed to him. There was an overpowering argument in its favour of which neither he nor Hanaud had told Betty a word. The shaft of the arrow had been discovered in Ann Upcott's room, and the dart in the house of Jean Cladel. These were overpowering facts. On the whole, it was better that Ann should go, now, whilst there was still time—if, that is, Hanaud did undoubtedly believe her to be guilty.

"But it is evident that he does," cried Betty.

Jim answered slowly:

"I suppose he does. We can make sure, anyway. I had a doubt last night. So I asked him point-blank."

"And he answered you?" Betty asked with a gasp.

"Yes and no. He gave me the strangest answer."

"What did he say?"

"He told me to visit the Church of Notre Dame. If I did, I should read upon the façade whether Ann was innocent or not."

Slowly every tinge of colour ebbed out of Betty's face. Her eyes stared at him horror-stricken. She sat, a figure of ice—except for her eyes which blazed.

"That's terrible," she said with a low voice, and again "That's terrible!" Then with a cry she stood erect "You shall see! Come!" and she ran towards the motorcar.

The sunlit day was spoilt for both of them. Betty drove homewards, bending over the wheel, her eyes fixed ahead. But Frobisher wondered whether she saw anything at all of that white road which the car devoured. Once as they dropped from the highland and the forests to the plains, she said:

"We shall abide by what we see?"

"Yes."

"If Hanaud thinks her innocent, she should stay. If he thinks her guilty, she must go."

"Yes," said Frobisher.

Betty guided the car through the streets of the city, and into a wide square. A great church of the Renaissance type, with octagonal cupolas upon its two towers and another little cupola surmounted by a loggia above its porch, confronted them. Betty stopped the car and led Frobisher into the porch. Above the door was a great bas-relief of the Last Judgment, God amongst the clouds, angels blowing trumpets, and the damned rising from their graves to undergo their torments. Both Betty and Frobisher gazed at the representation for a while in silence. To Frobisher it was a cruel and brutal piece of work which well matched Hanaud's revelation of his true belief.

"Yes, the message is easy to read," he said: and they drove back in a melancholy silence to the Maison Grenelle.

The chauffeur, Georges, came forward from the garage to take charge of the car. Betty ran inside the house and waited for Jim Frobisher to join her.

"I am so sorry," she said in a broken voice. "I kept a hope somewhere that we were all mistaken ... I mean as to the danger Ann was in.... I don't believe for a moment in her guilt, of course. But she must go—that's clear."

She went slowly up the stairs, and Jim saw no more of her until dinner was served long after its usual hour. Ann Upcott he had not seen at all that day, nor did he even see her then. Betty came to him in the library a few minutes before nine.

"We are very late, I am afraid. There are just the two of us, Jim," she said with a smile, and she led the way into the dining-room.

Through the meal she was anxious and preoccupied, nodding her assent to anything that he said, with her thoughts far away and answering him at random, or not answering him at all. She was listening, Frobisher fancied, for some sound in the hall, an expected sound which was overdue. For her eyes went continually to the clock, and a flurry and agitation, very strange in one naturally so still, became more and more evident in her manner. At length, just before ten o'clock, they both heard the horn of a motor-car in the quiet street. The car stopped, as it seemed to Frobisher, just outside the gates, and upon that there followed the sound for which Betty had so anxiously been listening—the closing of a heavy door by some one careful to close it quietly. Betty shot a quick glance at Jim Frobisher and coloured when he intercepted it. A few seconds afterwards the car moved on, and Betty drew a long breath. Jim Frobisher leaned forward to Betty. Though they were alone in the room, he spoke in a low voice of surprise:

"Ann Upcott has gone then?"

"Yes."

"So soon? You had everything already arranged then?"

"It was all arranged yesterday evening. She should be in Paris to-morrow morning, England to-morrow night. If only all goes well!"

Even in the stress of her anxiety Betty had been sensitive to a tiny note of discontent in Jim Frobisher's questions. He had been left out of the counsels of the two girls, their arrangements had been made without his participation, he had only been told of them at the last minute, just as if he was a babbler not to be trusted and an incompetent whose advice would only have been a waste of time. Betty made her excuses.

"It would have been better, of course, if we had got you to help us, Jim. But Ann wouldn't have it. She insisted that you had come out here on my account, and that you mustn't be dragged into such an affair as her flight and escape at all. She made it a condition, so I had to give way. But you can help me now tremendously."

Jim was appeased. Betty at all events had wanted him, was still alarmed lest their plan undertaken without his advice might miscarry.

"How can I help?"

"You can go to that cinema and keep Monsieur Hanaud engaged. It's important that he should know nothing about Ann's flight until late to-morrow."

Jim laughed at the futility of Hanaud's devices to hide himself. It was obviously all over the town that he spent his evenings in the Grande Taverne.

"Yes, I'll go," he returned. "I'll go now."

But Hanaud was not that night in his accustomed place, and Jim sat there alone until half-past ten. Then a man strolled out from one of the billiard-rooms, and standing behind Jim with his eyes upon the screen, said in a whisper:

"Do not look at me, Monsieur! It is Moreau. I go outside. Will you please to follow."

He strolled away. Jim gave him a couple of minutes' grace. He had remembered Hanaud's advice and had paid for his Bock when it had been brought to him. The little saucer was turned upside down to show that he owed nothing. When two minutes had elapsed he sauntered out and, looking neither to the right nor to the left, strolled indolently along the Rue de la Gare. When he reached the Place Darcy Nicolas Moreau passed him without a sign of recognition and struck off to the right along the Rue de la Liberté. Frobisher followed him with a sinking heart. It was folly of course to imagine that Hanaud could be so easily eluded. No doubt that motor-car had been stopped. No doubt Ann Upcott was already under lock and key! Why, the last words he had heard Hanaud speak were "I must be quick!"

Moreau turned off into the Boulevard Sevigne and, doubling back to the station square, slipped into one of the small hotels which cluster in that quarter. The lobby was empty; a staircase narrow and steep led from it to the upper stories. Moreau now ascended it with Frobisher at his heels, and opened a door. Frobisher looked into a small and dingy sitting-room at the back of the house. The windows were open, but the shutters were closed. A single pendant in the centre of the room gave it light, and at a table under the pendant Hanaud sat poring over a map.

The map was marked with red ink in a curious way. A sort of hoop, very much the shape of a tennis racket without its handle, was described upon it and from the butt to the top of the hoop an irregular line was drawn, separating the hoop roughly into two semi-circles. Moreau left Jim Frobisher standing there, and in a moment or two Hanaud looked up.

"Did you know, my friend," he asked very gravely, "that Ann Upcott has gone to-night to Madame Le Vay's fancy dress ball?"

Frobisher was taken completely by surprise.

"No, I see that you didn't," Hanaud went on. He took up his pen and placed a red spot at the edge of the hoop close by the butt.

Jim recovered from his surprise. Madame Le Vay's ball was the spot from which the start was to be made. The plan after all was not so ill-devised, if only Ann could have got to the ball unnoticed. Masked and in fancy dress, amongst a throng of people similarly accoutred, in a house with a garden, no doubt thrown open upon this hot night and lit only by lanterns discreetly dim—she had thus her best chance of escape. But the chance was already lost. For Hanaud laid down his pen again and said in ominous tones:

"The water-lily, eh? That pretty water-lily, my friend, will not dance very gaily to-night."

CHAPTER TWENTY: Map and the Necklace

Hanaud turned his map round and pushed it across the table to Jim Frobisher.

"What do you make of that?" he asked, and Jim drew up a chair and sat down to examine it.

He made first of all a large scale map of Dijon and its environments, the town itself lying at the bottom of the red hoop and constituting the top of the handle of the tennis racket. As to the red circle, it seemed to represent a tour which some one had made out from Dijon, round a good tract of outlying country and back again to the city. But there was more to it than that. The wavy dividing line, for instance, from the top of the circle to the handle, that is to Dijon; and on the left-hand edge of the hoop, as he bent over the map, and just outside Dijon, the red mark, a little red square which Hanaud had just made. Against this square an hour was marked.

"Eleven a.m.," he read.

He followed the red curve with his eyes and just where this dividing line touched the rim of the hoop, another period was inscribed. Here Frobisher read:

"Eleven forty."

Frobisher looked up at Hanaud in astonishment.

"Good God!" he exclaimed, and he bent again over the map. The point where the dividing line branched off was in a valley, as he could see by the contours—yes—he had found the name now—the Val Terzon. Just before eleven o'clock Betty had stopped the car just outside Dijon, opposite a park with a big house standing back, and had asked him to tighten the strap of the tool box. They had started again exactly at eleven. Betty had taken note of the exact time—and they had stopped where the secondary road branched off and doubled back to Dijon, at the top of the hoop, at the injunction of the rim and the dividing line, exactly at eleven forty.

"This is a chart of the expedition we made to-day," he cried. "We were followed then?"

He remembered suddenly the second motor-cyclist who had come up from behind through the screen of their dust and had stopped by the side of their car to join in their conversation with the tourist.

"The motor-cyclist?" he asked, and again he got no answer.

But the motor-cyclist had not followed them all the way round. On their homeward course they had stopped to lunch in the tangled garden. There had been no sign of the man. Jim looked at the map again. He followed the red line from the junction of the two roads, round the curve of the valley, to the angle where the great National road to Paris cut across and where they had lunched. After luncheon they had continued along the National road into Dijon, whereas the red line crossed it and came back by a longer and obviously a less frequented route.

"I can't imagine why you had us followed this morning, Monsieur Hanaud," he exclaimed with some heat. "But I can tell you this. The chase was not very efficiently contrived. We didn't come home that way at all."

"I haven't an idea how you came home," Hanaud answered imperturbably. "The line on that side of the circle has nothing to do with you at all, as you can see for yourself by looking at the time marked where the line begins."

The red hoop at the bottom was not complete; there was a space where the spliced handle of the racket would fit in, the space filled by the town of Dijon, and at the point on the right hand side where the line started Frobisher read in small but quite clear figures:

"Ten twenty-five a.m."

Jim was more bewildered than ever.

"I don't understand one word of it," he cried.

Hanaud reached over and touched the point with the tip of his pen.

"This is where the motor-cyclist started, the cyclist who met you at the branch road at eleven-forty."

"The tourist?" asked Jim. A second ago it had seemed to him impossible that the fog could thicken about his wits any more. And yet it had.

"Let us say the man with the portmanteau on his trailer," Hanaud corrected. "You see that he left his starting point in Dijon thirty-five minutes before you left yours. The whole manoeuvre seems to have been admirably planned. For you met precisely at the arranged spot at eleven-forty. Neither the car nor the cycle had to wait one moment."

"Manoeuvre! Arranged spot!" Frobisher exclaimed, looking about him in a sort of despair. "Has every one gone crazy? Why in the world should a man start out with a portmanteau in a side-car from Dijon at ten twenty-five, run thirty or forty miles into the country by a roundabout road and then return by a bad straight track? There's no sense in it!"

"No doubt it's perplexing," Hanaud agreed. He nodded to Moreau who went out of the room by a communicating door towards the front of the house. "But I can help you," Hanaud continued. "At the point where you started after tightening the strap of the tool-box, on the edge of the town, a big country house stands back in a park?"

"Yes," said Jim.

"That is the house of Madame Le Vay where this fancy dress ball takes place to-night."

"Madame Le Vay's château!" Frobisher repeated. "Where——" he began a question and caught it back. But Hanaud completed it for him.

"Yes, where Ann Upcott now is. You started from it at precisely eleven in the morning." He looked at his watch. "It is not yet quite eleven at night. So she is still there."

Frobisher started back in his chair. Hanaud's words were like the blade of silver light cutting through the darkness of the cinema hall and breaking into a sheet of radiance upon the screen. The meaning of the red diagram upon Hanaud's map, the unsuspected motive of Betty's expedition this morning were revealed to him.

"It was a rehearsal," he cried.

Hanaud nodded.

"A time-rehearsal."

"Yes, the sort of thing which takes place in theatres, without the principal members of the company," thought Frobisher. But a moment later he was dissatisfied with that explanation.

"Wait a moment!" he said. "That won't do, I fancy."

The motor-cyclist with the side-car had brought his arguments to a standstill. His times were marked upon the map; they were therefore of importance. What had he to do with Ann Upcott's escape? But he visualised the motor-cyclist and his side-car and his connection with the affair became evident. The big portmanteau gave Frobisher the clue. Ann Upcott would be leaving Madame Le Vay's house in her ball-dress, just as if she was returning to the Maison Grenelle—and without any luggage at all. She could not arrive in Paris in the morning like that if she were to avoid probably suspicion and certainly remark. The motor-cyclist was to meet her in the Val Terzon, transfer her luggage rapidly to her car, and then return to Dijon by the straight quick road whilst Ann turned off at the end of the valley to Paris. He remembered now that seven minutes had elapsed between the meeting of the cycle and the motor-car and their separation. Seven minutes then were allowed for the transference of the luggage. Another argument flashed into his thoughts. Betty had told him nothing of this plan. It had been presented to him as a mere excursion on a summer day, her first hours of liberty naturally employed. Her silence was all of a piece with the determination of Betty and Ann Upcott to keep him altogether out of the conspiracy. Every detail fitted like the blocks in a picture puzzle. Yes, there had been a time-rehearsal. And Hanaud knew all about it!

That was the disturbing certainty which first overwhelmed Frobisher when he had got the better of his surprise at the scheme itself. Hanaud knew! and Betty had so set her heart on Ann's escape.

"Let her go!" he pleaded earnestly. "Let Ann Upcott get away to Paris and to England!" and Hanaud leaned back in his chair with a little gasp. The queerest smile broke over his face.

"I see," he said.

"Oh, I know," Frobisher exclaimed, hotly appealing. "You are of the Sûrété and I am a lawyer, an officer of the High Court in my country and I have no right to make such a petition. But I do without a scruple. You can't get a conviction against Ann Upcott. You haven't a chance of it. But you can throw such a net of suspicion about her that she'll never get out of it. You can ruin her—yes—but that's all you can do."

"You speak very eagerly, my friend," Hanaud interposed.

Jim could not explain that it was Betty's anxiety to save her friend which inspired his plea. He fell back upon the scandal which such a trial would cause.

"There has been enough publicity already owing to Boris Waberski," he continued. "Surely Miss Harlowe has had distress enough. Why must she stand in the witness-box and give evidence against her friend in a trial which can have no result? That's what I want you to realise, Monsieur Hanaud. I have had some experience of criminal trials"—O shade of Mr. Haslitt! Why was that punctilious man not there in the flesh to wipe out with an indignant word the slur upon the firm of Frobisher and Haslitt?—"And I assure you that no jury could convict upon such evidence. Why, even the pearl necklace has not been traced—and it never will be. You can take that from me, Monsieur Hanaud! It never will be!"

Hanaud opened a drawer in the table and took out one of those little cedar-wood boxes made to hold a hundred cigarettes, which the better class of manufacturers use in England for their wares. He pushed this across the table towards Jim. Something which was more substantial than cigarettes rattled inside of it. Jim seized upon it in a panic. He had not a doubt that Betty would far sooner lose her necklace altogether than that her friend Ann Upcott should be destroyed by it. He opened the lid of the box. It was filled with cotton-wool. From the cotton-wool he took a string of pearls perfectly graded in size, and gleaming softly with a pink lustre which, even to his untutored eyes, was indescribably lovely.

"It would have been more correct if I had found them in a matchbox," said Hanaud. "But I shall point out to Monsieur Bex that after all matches and cigarettes are akin."

Jim was still staring at the necklace in utter disappointment when Moreau knocked upon the other side of the communicating door. Hanaud looked again at his watch.

"Yes, it is eleven o'clock. We must go. The car has started from the house of Madame Le Vay."

He rose from his chair, buried the necklace again within the layers of cotton-wool, and locked it up once more in the drawer. The room had faded away from Jim Frobisher's eyes. He was looking at a big, brilliantly illuminated house, and a girl who slipped from a window and, wrapping a dark cloak about her glistening dress, ran down the dark avenue in her dancing slippers to where a car waited hidden under trees.

"The car may not have started," Jim said with sudden hopefulness. "There may have been an accident to it. The chauffeur may be late. Oh, a hundred things may have happened!"

"With a scheme so carefully devised, so meticulously rehearsed? No, my friend."

Hanaud took an automatic pistol from a cabinet against the wall and placed it in his pocket.

"You are going to leave that necklace just like that in a table drawer?" Jim asked. "We ought to take it first to the Prefecture."

"This room is not unwatched," replied Hanaud. "It will be safe."

Jim hopefully tried another line of argument.

"We shall be too late now to intercept Ann Upcott at the branch road," he argued. "It is past eleven, as you say—well past eleven. And thirty-five minutes on a motor-cycle in the daytime means fifty minutes in a car at night, especially with a bad road to travel."

"We don't intend to intercept Ann Upcott at the branch road," Hanaud returned. He folded up the map and put it aside upon the mantelshelf.

"I take a big risk, you know," he said softly. "But I must take it! And—no! I can't be wrong!" But he turned from the mantelshelf with a very anxious and troubled face. Then, as he looked at Jim, a fresh idea came into his mind.

"By the way," he said. "The façade of Notre Dame?"

Jim nodded.

"The bas-relief of The Last Judgment. We went to see it. We thought your way of saying what you believed a little brutal."

Hanaud remained silent with his eyes upon the floor for a few seconds. Then he said quietly: "I am sorry." He tacked on a question. "You say 'we'?"

"Mademoiselle Harlowe and I," Jim explained.

"Oh, yes—to be sure. I should have thought of that," and once more his troubled cry broke from him. "It must be that!—No, I can't be wrong.... Anyway, it's too late to change now."

A second time Moreau rapped upon the communicating door. Hanaud sprang to alertness.

"That's it," he said. "Take your hat and stick, Monsieur Frobisher! Good! You are ready?" and the room was at once plunged into darkness.

Hanaud opened the communicating door, and they passed into the front room—a bedroom looking out upon the big station square. This room was in darkness too. But the shutters were not closed, and there were patches of light upon the walls from the lamps in the square and the Grande Taverne at the corner. The three men could see one another, and to Jim in this dusk the faces of his companions appeared of a ghastly pallor.

"Daunay took his position when I first knocked," said Moreau. "Patinot has just joined him."

He pointed across the square to the station buildings. Some cabs were waiting for the Paris train, and in front of them two men dressed like artisans were talking. One of them lit a cigarette from the stump of a cigarette held out to him by his companion. The watchers in the room saw the end of the cigarette glow red.

"The way is clear, Monsieur," said Moreau. "We can go." And he turned and went out of the inn to the staircase. Jim started to follow him. Whither they were going Jim had not a notion, not even a conjecture. But he was gravely troubled. All his hopes and Betty's hopes for the swift and complete suppression of the Waberski affair had seemingly fallen to the ground. He was not reassured when Hanaud's hand was laid on his arm and detained him.

"You understand, Monsieur Frobisher," said Hanaud with a quiet authority, his eyes shining very steadily in the darkness, his face glimmering very white, "that now the Law of France takes charge. There must not be a finger raised or a word spoken to hinder officers upon their duty. On the other hand, I make you in return the promise you desire. No one shall be arrested on suspicion. Your own eyes shall bear me out."

The two men followed Moreau down the stairs and into the street.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Secret House

It was a dark, clear night, the air very still and warm, and the sky bright with innumerable stars. The small company penetrated into the town by the backways and narrow alleys. Daunay going on ahead, Patinot the last by some thirty yards, and Moreau keeping upon the opposite side of the street. Once they had left behind them the lights of the station square, they walked amongst closed doors and the blind faces of unlit houses. Frobisher's heart raced within his bosom. He strained his eyes and ears for some evidence of spies upon their heels. But no one was concealed in any porch, and not the stealthiest sound of a pursuit was borne to their hearing.

"On a night like this," he said in tones which, strive as he might to steady them, were still a little tremulous, "one could hear a footstep on the stones a quarter of a mile away, and we hear nothing. Yet, if there is a gang, it can hardly be that we are unwatched."

Hanaud disagreed. "This is a night for alibis," he returned, lowering his voice; "good, sound, incontestable alibis. All but those engaged will be publicly with their friends, and those engaged do not know how near we are to their secrets."

They turned into a narrow street and kept on its left-hand side.

"Do you know where we are?" Hanaud asked. "No? Yet we are near to the Maison Grenelle. On the other side of these houses to our left runs the street of Charles-Robert."

Jim Frobisher stopped dead.

"It was here, then, that you came last night after I left you at the Prefecture," he exclaimed.

"Ah, you recognised me, then!" Hanaud returned imperturbably. "I wondered whether you did when you turned at the gates of your house."

On the opposite side of the street the houses were broken by a high wall, in which two great wooden doors were set. Behind the wall, at the end of a courtyard, the upper storey and the roof of a considerable house rose in a steep ridge against the stars.

Hanaud pointed towards it.

"Look at that house, Monsieur! There Madame Raviart came to live whilst she waited to be set free. It belongs to the Maison Grenelle. After she married Simon Harlowe, they would never let it, they kept it just as it was, the shrine of their passion—that strange romantic couple. But there was more romance in that, to be sure. It has been unoccupied ever since."

Jim Frobisher felt a chill close about his heart. Was that house the goal to which Hanaud was leading him with so confident a step? He looked at the gates and the house. Even in the night it had a look of long neglect and decay, the paint peeling from the doors and not a light in any window.

Some one in the street, however, was awake, for just above their heads, a window was raised with the utmost caution and a whisper floated down to them.

"No one has appeared."

Hanaud took no open notice of the whisper. He did not pause in his walk, but he said to Frobisher:

"And, as you hear, it is still unoccupied."

At the end of the street Daunay melted away altogether. Hanaud and Frobisher crossed the road and, with Moreau just ahead, turned down a passage between, the houses to the right.

Beyond the passage they turned again to the right into a narrow lane between high walls; and when they had covered thirty yards or so, Frobisher saw the branches of leafy trees over the wall upon his right. It was so dark here under the shade of the boughs that Frobisher could not even see his companions; and he knocked against Moreau before he understood that they had come to the end of their journey. They were behind the garden of the house in which Madame Raviart had lived and loved.

Hanaud's hand tightened upon Jim Frobisher's arm, constraining him to absolute immobility. Patinot had vanished as completely and noiselessly as Daunay. The three men left stood in the darkness and listened. A sentence which Ann Upcott had spoken in the garden of the Maison Grenelle, when she had been describing the terror with which she had felt the face bending over her in the darkness, came back to him. He had thought it false then. He took back his criticism now. For he too imagined that the beating of his heart must wake all Dijon.

They stood there motionless for the space of a minute, and then, at a touch from Hanaud, Nicolas Moreau stooped. Frobisher heard the palm of his hand sliding over wood and immediately after the tiniest little click as a key was fitted into a lock and turned. A door in the wall swung silently open and let a glimmer of light into the lane. The three men passed into a garden of weeds and rank grass and overgrown bushes. Moreau closed and locked the door behind them. As he locked the door the clocks of the city struck the half hour.

Hanaud whispered in Frobisher's ear:

"They have not yet reached the Val Terzon. Come!"

They crept over the mat of grass and weeds to the back of the house. A short flight of stone steps, patched with mould, descended from a terrace; at the back of the terrace were shuttered windows. But in the corner of the house, on a level with the garden, there was a door. Once more Moreau stooped, and once more a door swung inwards without a sound. But whereas the garden door had let through some gleam of twilight, this door opened upon the blackness of the pit. Jim Frobisher shrank back from it, not in physical fear but in an appalling dread that some other man than he, wearing his clothes and his flesh, would come out of that door again. His heart came to a standstill, and then Hanaud pushed him gently into the passage. The door was closed behind them, an almost inaudible sound told him that now the door was locked.

"Listen!" Hanaud whispered sharply. His trained ear had caught a sound in the house above them. And in a second Frobisher heard it too, a sound regular and continuous and very slight, but in that uninhabited house filled with uttermost blackness, very daunting. Gradually the explanation dawned upon Jim.

"It's a clock ticking," he said under his breath.

"Yes! A clock ticking away in the empty house!" returned Hanaud. And though his answer was rather breathed than whispered, there was a queer thrill in it the sound of which Jim could not mistake. The hunter had picked up his spoor. Just beyond the quarry would come in view.

Suddenly a thread of light gleamed along the passage, lit up a short flight of stairs and a door on the right at the head of them, and went out again. Hanaud slipped his electric torch back into his pocket and, passing Moreau, took the lead. The door at the head of the stairs opened with a startling whine of its hinges. Frobisher stopped with his heart in his throat, though what he feared he could not have told even himself. Again the thread of light shone, and this time it explored. The three found themselves in a stone-flagged hall.

Hanaud crossed it, extinguished his torch and opened a door. A broken shutter, swinging upon a hinge, enabled them dimly to see a gallery which stretched away into the gloom. The faint light penetrating from the window showed them a high double door leading to some room at the back of the house. Hanaud stole over the boards and laid his ear to the panel. In a little while he was satisfied; his hand dropped to the knob and a leaf of the door opened noiselessly. Once more the torch glowed. Its beam played upon the high ceiling, the tall windows shrouded in heavy curtains of red silk brocade, and revealed to Frobisher's amazement a room which had a look of daily use. All was orderly and clean, the furniture polished and in good repair; there were fresh flowers in the vases, whose perfume filled the air; and it was upon the marble chimney-piece of this room that the clock ticked.

The room was furnished with lightness and elegance, except for one fine and massive press, with double doors in marquetry, which occupied a recess near to the fireplace. Girandoles with mirrors and gilt frames, now fitted with electric lights, were fixed upon the walls, with a few pictures in water-colour. A chandelier glittering with lustres hung from the ceiling, an Empire writing-table stood near the window, a deep-cushioned divan stretched along the wall opposite the fire-place. So much had Frobisher noticed when the light again went out. Hanaud closed the door upon the room again.

"We shall be hidden in the embrasure of any of these windows," Hanaud whispered, when they were once more in the long gallery. "No light will be shown here with that shutter hanging loose, we may be sure. Meanwhile let us watch and be very silent."

They took their stations in the deep shadows by the side of the window with the broken shutter. They could see dimly the courtyard and the great carriage doors in the wall at the end of it, and they waited; Jim Frobisher under such a strain of dread and expectancy that each second seemed an hour, and he wondered at the immobility of his companions. The only sound of breathing that he heard came from his own lungs.

In a while Hanaud laid a hand upon his sleeve, and the clasp of the hand tightened and tightened. Motionless though he stood like a man in a seizure, Hanaud too was in the grip of an intense excitement. For one of the great leaves of the courtyard door was opening silently. It opened just a little way and as silently closed again. But some one had slipped in—so vague and swift and noiseless a figure that Jim would have believed his imagination had misled him but for a thicker blot of darkness at the centre of the great door. There some one stood now who had not stood there a minute before, as silent and still as any of the watchers in the gallery, and more still than one. For Hanaud moved suddenly away on the tips of his toes into the deepest of the gloom and, sinking down upon his heels, drew his watch from his pocket. He drew his coat closely about it and for a fraction of a second flashed his torchlight on the dial. It was now five minutes past twelve.

"It is the time," he breathed as he crept back to his place. "Listen now!"

A minute passed and another. Frobisher found himself shivering as a man shivers at a photographer's when he is told by the operator to keep still. He had a notion that he was going to fall. Then a distant noise caught his ear, and at once his nerves grew steady. It was the throb of a motor-cycle, and it grew louder and louder. He felt Hanaud stiffen at his side. Hanaud had been right, then! The conviction deepened in his mind. When all had been darkness and confusion to him, Hanaud from the first had seen clearly. But what had he seen? Frobisher was still unable to answer that question, and whilst he fumbled amongst conjectures a vast relief swept over him. For the noise of the cycle had ceased altogether. It had roared through some contiguous street and gone upon its way into the open country. Not the faintest pulsation of its engine was any longer audible. That late-faring traveller had taken Dijon in his stride.

In a revulsion of relief he pictured him devouring the road, the glow of his lamp putting the stars to shame, the miles leaping away behind him; and suddenly the pleasant picture was struck from before his vision and his heart fluttered up into his throat. For the leaf of the great coach-door was swung wider, and closed again, and the motor-cycle with its side-car was within the courtyard. The rider had slipped out his clutch and stopped his engine more than a hundred yards away in the other street. His own impetus had been enough and more than enough to swing him round the corner along the road and into the courtyard. The man who had closed the door moved to his side as he dismounted. Between them they lifted something from the side-car and laid it on the ground. The watchman held open the door again, the cyclist wheeled out his machine, the door was closed, a key turned in the lock. Not a word had been spoken, not an unnecessary movement made. It had all happened within the space of a few seconds. The man waited by the gate, and in a little while from some other street the cyclist's engine was heard once more to throb. His work was done.

Jim Frobisher wondered that Hanaud should let him go. But Hanaud had eyes for no one but the man who was left behind and the big package upon the ground under the blank side wall. The man moved to it, stooped, raised it with an appearance of effort, then stood upright holding it in his arms. It was something shapeless and long and heavy. So much the watchers in the gallery could see, but no more.

The man in the courtyard moved towards the door without a sound; and Hanaud drew his companions back from the window of the broken shutter. Quick as they were, they were only just in time to escape from that revealing twilight. Already the intruder with his burden stood within the gallery. The front door was unlatched, that was clear. It had needed but a touch to open it. The intruder moved without a sound to the double door, of which Hanaud had opened one leaf. He stood in front of it, pushed it with his foot and both the leaves swung inwards. He disappeared into the room. But the faint misty light had fallen upon him for a second, and though none could imagine who he was, they all three saw that what he carried was a heavy sack.

Now, at all events, Hanaud would move, thought Frobisher. But he did not. They all heard the man now, but not his footsteps. It was just the brushing of his clothes against furniture: then came a soft, almost inaudible sound, as though he had laid his burden down upon the deep-cushioned couch: then he himself reappeared in the doorway, his arms empty, his hat pressed down upon his forehead, and a dim whiteness where his face should be. But dark as it was, they saw the glitter of his eyes.

"It will be now," Frobisher said to himself, expecting that Hanaud would leap from the gloom and bear the intruder to the ground.

But this man, too, Hanaud let go. He closed the doors again, drawing the two leaves together, and stole from the gallery. No one heard the outer door close, but with a startling loudness some metal thing rang upon stone, and within the house. Even Jim Frobisher understood that the outer door had been locked and the key dropped through the letter slot. The three men crept back to their window. They saw the intruder cross the courtyard, open one leaf of the coach door, peer this way and that and go. Again a key tinkled upon stones. The key of the great door had been pushed or kicked underneath it back into the courtyard. The clocks suddenly chimed the quarter. To Frobisher's amazement it was a quarter-past twelve. Between the moment when the cyclist rode his car in at the doors and now, just five minutes had elapsed. And again, but for the three men, the house was empty.

Or was it empty?

For Hanaud had slipped across to the door of the room and opened it; and a slight sound broke out of that black room, as of some living thing which moved uneasily. At Jim Frobisher's elbow Hanaud breathed a sigh of relief. Something, it seemed, had happened for which he had hardly dared to hope; some great dread he knew with certainty had not been fulfilled. On the heels of that sigh a sharp loud click rang out, the release of a spring, the withdrawal of a bolt. Hanaud drew the door swiftly to and the three men fell back. Some one had somehow entered that room, some one was moving quietly about it. From the corner of the corridor in which they had taken refuge, the three men saw the leaves of the door swing very slowly in upon their hinges. Some one appeared upon the threshold, and stood motionless, listening, and after a few seconds advanced across the gallery to the window. It was a girl—so much they could determine from the contour of her head and the slim neck. To the surprise of those three a second shadow flitted to her side. Both of them peered from the window into the courtyard. There was nothing to tell them there whether the midnight visitors had come and gone or not yet come at all. One of them whispered:

"The key!"

And the other, the shorter one, crept into the hall and returned with the key which had been dropped through the letter slot in her hand. The taller of the two laughed, and the sound of it, so clear, so joyous like the trill of a bird, it was impossible for Jim Frobisher even for a second to mistake. The second girl standing at the window of this dark and secret house, with the key in her hand to tell her that all that had been plotted had been done, was Betty Harlowe. Jim Frobisher had never imagined a sound so sinister, so alarming, as that clear, joyous laughter lilting through the silent gallery. It startled him, it set his whole faith in the world shuddering.

"There must be some good explanation," he argued, but his heart was sinking amidst terrors. Of what dreadful event was that laughter to be the prelude?

The two figures at the window flitted back across the gallery. It seemed that there was no further reason for precautions.

"Shut the door, Francine," said Betty in her ordinary voice. And when this was done, within the room the lights went on. But time and disuse had warped the doors. They did not quite close, and between them a golden strip of light showed like a wand.

"Let us see now!" cried Betty. "Let us see," and again she laughed; and under the cover of her laughter the three men crept forward and looked in: Moreau upon his knees, Frobisher stooping above him, Hanaud at his full height behind them all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Corona Machine

The detective's hand fell softly upon Frobisher's shoulder warning him to silence; and this warning was needed. The lustres of the big glass chandelier were so many flashing jewels; the mirrors of the girandoles multiplied their candle-lamps; the small gay room was ablaze; and in the glare Betty stood and laughed. Her white shoulders rose from a slim evening frock of black velvet; from her carefully dressed copper hair to her black satin shoes she was as trim as if she had just been unpacked from a bandbox; and she was laughing whole-heartedly at a closed sack on the divan, a sack which jerked and flapped grotesquely like a fish on a beach. Some one was imprisoned within that sack. Jim Frobisher could not doubt who that some one was, and it seemed to him that no sound more soulless and cruel had ever been heard in the world than Betty's merriment. She threw her head back: Jim could see her slender white throat working, her shoulders flashing and shaking. She clapped her hands with a horrible glee. Something died within Frobisher's breast as he heard it. Was it in his heart, he wondered? It was, however, to be the last time that Betty Harlowe laughed.

"You can get her out, Francine," she said, and whilst Francine with a pair of scissors cut the end of the sack loose, she sat down with her back to it at the writing-table and unlocked a drawer. The sack was cut away and thrown upon the floor, and now on the divan Ann Upcott lay in her gleaming dancing-dress, her hands bound behind her back, and her ankles tied cruelly together. Her hair was dishevelled, her face flushed, and she had the look of one quite dazed. She drew in deep breaths of air, with her bosom labouring. But she was unaware for the moment of her predicament or surroundings, and her eyes rested upon Francine and travelled from her to Betty's back without a gleam of recognition. She wrenched a little at her wrists, but even that movement was instinctive; and then she closed her eyes and lay still, so still that but for her breathing the watchers at the door would hardly have believed that she still lived.

Betty, meanwhile, lifted from the open drawer, first a small bottle half-filled with a pale yellow liquid, and next a small case of morocco leather. From the case she took a hypodermic syringe and its needle, and screwed the two parts together.

"Is she ready?" Betty asked as she removed the stopper from the bottle.

"Quite, Mademoiselle," answered Francine. She began with a giggle, but she looked at the prisoner as she spoke and she ended with a startled gasp. For Ann was looking straight at her with the strangest, disconcerting stare. It was impossible to say whether she knew Francine or knowing her would not admit her knowledge. But her gaze never faltered, it was actually terrifying by its fixity, and in a sharp, hysterical voice Francine suddenly cried out:

"Turn your eyes away from me, will you?" and she added with a shiver: "It's horrible, Mademoiselle! It's like a dead person watching you as you move about the room."

Betty turned curiously towards the divan and Ann's eyes wandered off to her. It seemed as though it needed just that interchange of glances to awaken her. For as Betty resumed her work of filling the hypodermic syringe from the bottle, a look of perplexity crept into Ann Upcott's face. She tried to sit up, and finding that she could not, tore at the cords which bound her wrists. Her feet kicked upon the divan. A moan of pain broke from her lips, and with that consciousness returned to her.

"Betty!" she whispered, and Betty turned with the needle ready in her hand. She did not speak, but her face spoke for her. Her upper lip was drawn back a little from her teeth, and there was a look in her great eyes which appalled Jim Frobisher outside the door. Once before he had seen just that look—when Betty was lying on Mrs. Harlowe's bed for Hanaud's experiment and he had lingered in the treasure-room with Ann Upcott. It had been inscrutable to him then, but it was as plain as print now. It meant murder. And so Ann Upcott understood it. Helpless as she was, she shrank back upon the divan; in a panic she spoke with faltering lips and her eyes fixed upon Betty with a dreadful fascination.

"Betty! You had me taken and brought here! You sent me to Madame Le Vay's—on purpose. Oh! The letter, then! The anonymous letter!"—and a new light broke in upon Ann's mind, a new terror shook her. "You wrote it! Betty, you! You—the Scourge!"

She sank back and again struggled vainly with her bonds. Betty rose from her chair and crossed the room towards her, the needle shining bright in her hand. Her hapless prisoner saw it.

"What's that?" she cried, and she screamed aloud. The extremity of her horror lent to her an unnatural strength. Somehow she dragged herself up and got her feet to the ground. Somehow she stood upright, swaying as she stood.

"You are going to——" she began, and broke off. "Oh, no! You couldn't! You couldn't!"

Betty put out a hand and laid it on Ann's shoulder and held her so for a moment, savouring her vengeance.

"Whose face was it bending so close down over yours in the darkness?" she asked in a soft and dreadful voice. "Whose face, Ann? Guess!" She shook her swaying prisoner with a gentleness as dreadful as her quiet voice. "You talk too much. Your tongue's dangerous, Ann. You are too curious, Ann! What were you doing in the treasure-room yesterday evening with your watch in your hand? Eh? Can't you answer, you pretty fool?" Then Betty's voice changed. It remained low and quiet, but hatred crept into it, a deep, whole-hearted hatred.

"You have been interfering with me too, haven't you, Ann? Oh, we both understand very well!" And Hanaud's hand tightened upon Frobisher's shoulder. Here was the real key and explanation of Betty's hatred. Ann Upcott knew too much, was getting to know more, might at any moment light upon the whole truth. Yes! Ann Upcott's disappearance would look like a panic-stricken flight, would have the effect of a confession—no doubt! But above all these considerations, paramount in Betty Harlowe's mind was the resolve at once to punish and rid herself of a rival.

"All this week, you have been thrusting yourself in my way!" she said. "And here's your reward for it, Ann. Yes. I had you bound hand and foot and brought here. The water-lily!" She looked her victim over as she stood in her delicate bright frock, her white silk stockings and satin slippers, swaying in terror. "Fifteen minutes, Ann! That fool of a detective was right! Fifteen minutes! That's all the time the arrow-poison takes!"

Ann's eyes opened wide. The blood rushed into her white face and ebbed, leaving it whiter than it was before.

"Arrow-poison!" she cried. "Betty! It was you, then! Oh!" she would have fallen forward, but Betty Harlowe pushed her shoulder gently and she fell back upon the divan. That Betty had been guilty of that last infamy—the murder of her benefactress—not until this moment had Ann Upcott for one moment suspected. It was clear to her, too, that there was not the slightest hope for her. She burst suddenly into a storm of tears.

Betty Harlowe sat down on the divan beside her and watched her closely and curiously with a devilish enjoyment. The sound of the girl's sobbing was music in her ears. She would not let it flag.

"You shall lie here in the dark all night, Ann, and alone," she said in a low voice, bending over her, "To-morrow Espinosa will put you under one of the stone flags in the kitchen. But to-night you shall lie just as you are. Come!"

She bent over Ann Upcott, gathering the flesh of her arm with one hand and advancing the needle with the other; and a piercing scream burst from Francine Rollard.

"Look!" she cried, and she pointed to the door. It was open and Hanaud stood upon the threshold.

Betty looked up at the cry and the blood receded from her face. She sat like an image of wax, staring at the open doorway, and a moment afterwards with a gesture swift as lightning she drove the needle into the flesh of her own arm and emptied it.

Frobisher with a cry of horror started forward to prevent her, but Hanaud roughly thrust him back.

"I warned you, Monsieur, not to interfere," he said with a savage note in his voice, which Jim had not heard before; and Betty Harlowe dropped the needle on to the couch, whence it rolled to the floor.

She sprang up now to her full height, her heels together, her arms outstretched from her sides.

"Fifteen minutes, Monsieur Hanaud," she cried with bravado. "I am safe from you."

Hanaud laughed and wagged his forefinger contemptuously in her face.

"Coloured water, Mademoiselle, doesn't kill."

Betty swayed upon her feet and steadied herself.

"Bluff, Monsieur Hanaud!" she said.

"We shall see."

The confidence of his tone convinced her. She flashed across the room to her writing-table. Swift as she was, Hanaud met her there.

"Ah, no!" he cried. "That's quite a different thing!" He seized her wrists. "Moreau!" he called, with a nod towards Francine. "And you, Monsieur Frobisher, will you release that young lady, if you please!"

Moreau dragged Francine Rollard from the room and locked her safely away. Jim seized upon the big scissors and cut the cords about Ann's wrists and ankles, and unwound them. He was aware that Hanaud had flung the chair from the writing-table into an open space, that Betty was struggling and then was still, that Hanaud had forced her into the chair and snatched up one of the cords which Frobisher had dropped upon the floor. When he had finished his work, he saw that Betty was sitting with her hands in handcuffs and her ankles tied to one of the legs of the chair; and Hanaud was staunching with his handkerchief a wound in his hand which bled. Betty had bitten him like a wild animal caught in a trap.

"Yes, you warned me, Mademoiselle, the first morning I met you," Hanaud said with a savage irony, "that you didn't wear a wrist-watch, because you hated things on your wrists. My apologies! I had forgotten!"

He went back to the writing-table and thrust his hand into the drawer. He drew out a small cardboard box and removed the lid.

"Five!" he said. "Yes! Five!"

He carried the box across the room to Frobisher, who was standing against the wall with a face like death.

"Look!"

There were five white tablets in the box.

"We know where the sixth is. Or, rather, we know where it was. For I had it analysed to-day. Cyanide of potassium, my friend! Crunch one of them between your teeth and—fifteen minutes? Not a bit of it! A fraction of a second! That's all!"

Frobisher leaned forward and whispered in Hanaud's ear. "Leave them within her reach!"

His first instinctive thought had been to hinder Betty from destroying herself. Now he prayed that she might, and with so desperate a longing that a deep pity softened Hanaud's eyes.

"I must not, Monsieur," he said gently. He turned to Moreau. "There is a cab waiting at the corner of the Maison Grenelle," and Moreau went in search of it. Hanaud went over to Ann Upcott, who was sitting upon the divan her head bowed, her body shivering. Every now and then she handled and eased one of her tortured wrists.

"Mademoiselle," he said, standing in front of her, "I owe you an explanation and an apology. I never from the beginning—no, not for one moment—believed that you were guilty of the murder of Madame Harlowe. I was sure that you had never touched the necklace of pink pearls—oh, at once I was sure, long before I found it. I believed every word of the story you told us in the garden. But none of this dared I shew you. For only by pretending that I was convinced of your guilt, could I protect you during this last week in the Maison Grenelle."

"Thank you, Monsieur," she replied with a wan effort at a smile.

"But, for to-night, I owe you an apology," he continued. "I make it with shame. That you were to be brought back here to the tender mercies of Mademoiselle Betty, I hadn't a doubt. And I was here to make sure you should be spared them. But I have never in my life had a more difficult case to deal with, so clear a conviction in my own mind, so little proof to put before a court. I had to have the evidence which I was certain to find in this room to-night. But I ask you to believe me that if I had imagined for a moment the cruelty with which you were to be handled, I should have sacrificed this evidence. I beg you to forgive me."

Ann Upcott held out her hand.

"Monsieur Hanaud," she replied simply, "but for you I should not be now alive. I should be lying here in the dark and alone, as it was promised to me, waiting for Espinosa—and his spade." Her voice broke and she shuddered violently so that the divan shook on which she sat.

"You must forget these miseries," he said gently. "You have youth, as I told you once before. A little time and——"

The return of Nicolas Moreau interrupted him; and with Moreau came a couple of gendarmes and Girardot the Commissary.

"You have Francine Rollard?" Hanaud asked.

"You can hear her," Moreau returned dryly.