"Oh, but quite nice people too," Ann rejoined. Her face was glowing with the recollections of that short joyous time. She had forgotten, for the moment, altogether the predicament in which she stood, or she was acting with an artfulness which Hanaud could hardly have seen surpassed in all his experience of criminals.
"There was a croupier, for instance, at the trente-et-quarante table in the big room of the Sporting Club. I always tried to sit next to him. For he saw that no one stole my money and that when I was winning I insured my stake and clawed a little off the heap from time to time. I was there for five weeks and I had made four hundred pounds—and then came three dreadful nights and I lost everything except thirty pounds which I had stowed away in the hotel safe." She nodded across the hall towards Jim. "Monsieur Frobisher can tell you about the last night. For he sat beside me and very prettily tried to make me a present of a thousand francs."
Hanaud, however, was not to be diverted.
"Afterwards he shall tell me," he said, and resumed his questions. "You had met Waberski before that night?"
"Yes, a fortnight before. But I can't remember who introduced me."
"And Mademoiselle Harlowe?"
"Monsieur Boris introduced me a day or two later to Betty at tea-time in the lounge of the Hôtel de Paris."
"Aha!" said Hanaud. He glanced at Jim with an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. It was, indeed, becoming more and more obvious that Waberski had brought Ann Upcott into that household deliberately, as part of a plan carefully conceived and in due time to be fulfilled.
"When did Waberski first suggest that you should join Mademoiselle Harlowe?" he asked.
"That last night," Ann replied. "He had been standing opposite to me on the other side of the trente-et-quarante table. He saw that I had been losing."
"Yes," said Hanaud, nodding his head. "He thought that the opportune moment had come."
He extended his arms and let his hands fall against his thighs. He was like a doctor presented with a hopeless case. He turned half aside from Ann with his shoulders bent and his troubled eyes fixed upon the marble squares of the floor. Jim could not but believe that he was at this moment debating whether he should take the girl into custody. But Betty intervened.
"You must not be misled, Monsieur Hanaud," she said quickly, "It is true no doubt that Monsieur Boris mentioned the subject to Ann for the first time that night. But I had already told both my aunt and Monsieur Boris that I should like a friend of my own age to live with me and I had mentioned Ann."
Hanaud looked up at her doubtfully.
"On so short an acquaintance, Mademoiselle?"
Betty, however, stuck to her guns.
"Yes. I liked her very much from the beginning. She was alone. It was quite clear that she was of our own world. There was every good reason why I should wish for her. And the four months she has been with me have proved to me that I was right."
She crossed over to Ann with a defiant little nod at Hanaud, who responded with a cordial grin and dropped into English.
"So I can push that into my pipe and puff it, as my dear Ricardo would say. That is what you mean? Well, against loyalty, the whole world is powerless." As he made Betty a friendly bow. He could hardly have told Betty in plainer phrase that her intervention had averted Ann's arrest; or Ann herself that he believed her guilty.
Every one in the hall understood him in that sense. They stood foolishly looking here and looking there and not knowing where to look; and in the midst of their discomfort occurred an incongruous little incident which added a touch of the bizarre. Up the two steps to the open door came a girl carrying a big oblong cardboard milliner's box. Her finger was on the bell, when Hanaud stepped forward.
"There is no need to ring," he said. "What have you there?"
The girl stepped into the hall and looked at Ann.
"It is Mademoiselle's dress for the Ball to-morrow night. Mademoiselle was to call for a final fitting but did not come. But Madame Grolin thinks that it will be all right." She laid the box upon a chest at the side of the hall and went out again.
"I had forgotten all about it," said Ann. "It was ordered just before Madame died and tried on once."
Hanaud nodded.
"For Madame Le Vay's masked ball, no doubt," he said. "I noticed the invitation card on the chimney-piece of Mademoiselle's sitting-room. And in what character did Mademoiselle propose to go?"
Ann startled them all. She flung up her head, whilst the blood rushed into her cheeks and her eyes shone.
"Not Madame de Brinvilliers, Monsieur, at all events," she cried.
Even Hanaud was brought up with a start.
"I did not suggest it," he replied coldly. "But let me see!" and in a moment whilst his face was flushed with anger his hands were busily untying the tapes of the box.
Betty stepped forward.
"We talked over that little dress, together, Monsieur, more than a month ago. It is meant to represent a water-lily."
"What could be more charming?" Hanaud asked, but his fingers did not pause in their work.
"Could suspicion betray itself more brutally?" Jim Frobisher wondered. What could he expect to find in that box? Did he imagine that this Madame Grolin, the milliner, was an accomplice of Waberski's too? The episode was ludicrous with a touch of the horrible. Hanaud lifted off the lid and turned back the tissue-paper. Underneath was seen a short crêpe de Chine frock of a tender vivid green with a girdle of gold and a great gold rosette at the side. The skirt was stiffened to stand out at the hips, and it was bordered with a row of white satin rosettes with golden hearts. To complete the dress there were a pair of white silk stockings with fine gold clocks and white satin shoes with single straps across the insteps and little tassels of brilliants where the straps buttoned, and four gold stripes at the back round the heels.
Hanaud felt under the frock and around the sides, replaced the lid, and stood up again. He never looked at Ann Upcott. He went straight across to Betty Harlowe.
"I regret infinitely, Mademoiselle, that I have put you to so much trouble and occupied so many hours of your day," he said with a good deal of feeling. He made her a courteous bow, took up his hat and stick from the table on which he had laid it, and made straight for the hall door. His business in the Maison Grenelle was to all appearances finished.
But Monsieur Bex was not content. He had been nursing his suggestion for nearly half an hour. Like a poem it demanded utterance.
"Monsieur Hanaud!" he called; "Monsieur Hanaud! I have to tell you about a box of matches."
"Aha!" Hanaud answered, stopping alertly. "A box of matches! I will walk with you towards your office, and you shall tell me as you go."
Monsieur Bex secured his hat and his stick in a great hurry. But he had time to throw a glance of pride towards his English colleague. "Your suggestion about the treasure room was of no value, my friend. Let us see what I can do!" The pride and the airy wave of the hand spoke the unspoken words. Monsieur Bex was at Hanaud's side in a moment, and talked volubly as they passed out of the gates into the street of Charles-Robert.
Betty turned to Jim Frobisher.
"To-morrow, now that I am once allowed to use my motor-car, I shall take you for a drive and show you something of our neighbourhood. This afternoon—you will understand, I know—I belong to Ann."
She took Ann Upcott by the arm and the two girls went out into the garden. Jim was left alone in the hall—as at that moment he wanted to be. It was very still here now and very silent. The piping of birds, the drone of bees outside the open doors were rather an accompaniment than an interruption of the silence. Jim placed himself where Hanaud had stood at that moment when he had laughed so strangely—half-way between the foot of the stairs where Monsieur Bex and he himself had been standing and the open porch. But Jim could detect nothing whatever to provoke any laughter, any excitement. "That I should have lived all these years and never noticed it before," he had exclaimed. Notice what? There was nothing to notice. A table, a chair or two, a barometer hanging upon the wall on one side and a mirror hanging upon the wall on the other—No, there was nothing. Of course, Jim reflected, there was a strain of the mountebank in Hanaud. The whole of that little scene might have been invented by him maliciously, just to annoy and worry and cause discomfort to Monsieur Bex and himself. Hanaud was very capable of a trick like that! A strain of the mountebank indeed! He had a great deal of the mountebank. More than half of him was probably mountebank. Possibly quite two-thirds!
"Oh, damn the fellow! What in the world did he notice?" cried Jim. "What did he notice from the top of the Tower? What did he notice in this hall? Why must he be always noticing something?" and he jammed his hat on in a rage and stalked out of the house.
At nine o'clock that night Jim Frobisher walked past the cashier's desk and into the hall of the Grande Taverne. High above his head the cinematograph machine whirred and clicked and a blade of silver light cut the darkness. At the opposite end of the hall the square screen was flooded with radiance and the pictures melted upon it one into the other.
For a little while Jim could see nothing but that screen. Then the hall swam gradually within his vision. He saw the heads of people like great bullets and a wider central corridor where waitresses with white aprons moved. Jim walked up the corridor and turned off to the left between the tables. When he reached the wall he went forward again towards the top of the hall. On his left the hall fell back, and in the recess were two large cubicles in which billiard tables were placed. Against the wall of the first of these a young man was leaning with his eyes fixed upon the screen. Jim fancied that he recognised Maurice Thevenet, and nodded to him as he passed. A little further on a big man with a soft felt hat was seated alone, with a Bock in front of him—Hanaud. Jim slipped into a seat at his side.
"You?" Hanaud exclaimed in surprise.
"Why not? You told me this is where you would be at this hour," replied Jim, and some note of discouragement in his voice attracted Hanaud's attention.
"I didn't think that those two young ladies would let you go," he said.
"On the contrary," Jim replied with a short laugh. "They didn't want me at all."
He began to say something more, but thought better of it, and called to a waitress.
"Two Bocks, if you please," he ordered, and he offered Hanaud a cigar.
When the Bocks were brought, Hanaud said to him:
"It will be well to pay at once, so that we can slip away when we want."
"We have something to do to-night?" Jim asked.
"Yes."
He said no more until Jim had paid and the waitress had turned the two little saucers on which she had brought the Bocks upside down and had gone away. Then he leaned towards Jim and lowered his voice.
"I am glad that you came here. For I have a hope that we shall get the truth to-night, and you ought to be present when we do get it."
Jim lit his own cigar.
"From whom do you hope to get it?"
"Jean Cladel," Hanaud answered in a whisper. "A little later when all the town is quiet we will pay a visit to the street of Gambetta."
"You think he'll talk?"
Hanaud nodded.
"There is no charge against Cladel in this affair. To make a solution of that poison paste is not an offence. And he has so much against him that he will want to be on our side if he can. Yes, he will talk I have no doubt."
There would be an end of the affair then, to-night. Jim Frobisher was glad with an unutterable gladness. Betty would be free to order her life as she liked, and where she liked, to give to her youth its due scope and range, to forget the terror and horror of these last weeks, as one forgets old things behind locked doors.
"I hope, however," he said earnestly to Hanaud, "and I believe, that you will be found wrong, that if there was a murder Ann Upcott had nothing to do with it. Yes, I believe that." He repeated his assertion as much to convince himself as to persuade Hanaud.
Hanaud touched his elbow.
"Don't raise your voice too much, my friend," he said. "I think there is some one against the wall who is honouring us with his attention."
Jim shook his head.
"It is only Maurice Thevenet," he said.
"Oho?" answered Hanaud in a voice of relief. "Is that all? For a moment I was anxious. It seemed that there was a sentinel standing guard over us." He added in a whisper, "I, too, hope from the bottom of my heart that I may be proved wrong. But what of that arrow head in the pen tray? Eh? Don't forget that!" Then he fell into a muse.
"What happened on that night in the Maison Crenelle?" he said. "Why was that communicating door thrown open? Who was to be stripped to the skin by that violent woman? Who whispered 'That will do now'? Is Ann Upcott speaking the truth, and was there some terrible scene taking place before she entered so unexpectedly the treasure room—some terrible scene which ended in that dreadful whisper? Or is Ann Upcott lying from beginning to end? Ah, my friend, you wrote some questions down upon your memorandum this afternoon. But these are the questions I want answered, and where shall I find the answers?"
Jim had never seen Hanaud so moved. His hands were clenched, and the veins prominent upon his forehead, and though he whispered his voice shook.
"Jean Cladel may help," said Jim.
"Yes, yes, he may tell us something."
They sat through an episode of the film, and saw the lights go up and out again, and then Hanaud looked eagerly at his watch and put it back again into his pocket with a gesture of annoyance.
"It is still too early?" Jim asked.
"Yes. Cladel has no servant and takes his meals abroad. He has not yet returned home."
A little before ten o'clock a man strolled in, and seating himself at a table behind Hanaud twice scraped a match upon a match-box without getting a light. Hanaud, without moving, said quietly to Frobisher:
"He is at home now. In a minute I shall go. Give me five minutes and follow."
Jim nodded.
"Where shall we meet?"
"Walk straight along the Rue de la Liberté, and I will see to that," said Hanaud.
He pulled his packet of cigarettes from his pocket, put one between his lips, and took his time in lighting it. Then he got up, but to his annoyance Maurice Thevenet recognised him and came forward.
"When Monsieur Frobisher wished me good-evening and joined you I thought it was you, Monsieur Hanaud. But I had not the presumption to recall myself to your notice."
"Presumption! Monsieur, we are of the same service, only you have the advantage of youth," said Hanaud politely, as he turned.
"But you are going, Monsieur Hanaud?" Thevenet asked in distress. "I am desolated. I have broken into a conversation like a clumsy fellow."
"Not at all," Hanaud replied. To Frobisher his patience was as remarkable as Maurice Thevenet's impudence. "We were idly watching a film which I think is a little tedious."
"Then, since you are not busy I beg for your indulgence. One little moment that is all. I should so dearly love to be able to say to my friends, 'I sat in the cinema with Monsieur Hanaud—yes, actually I'—and asked for his advice."
Hanaud sat down again upon his chair.
"And upon what subject can you, of whom Monsieur Girardot speaks so highly, want my advice?" Hanaud asked with a laugh.
The eternal ambition of the provincial was tormenting the eager youth. To get to Paris—all was in that! Fortune, reputation, a life of colour. A word from Monsieur Hanaud and a way would open. He would work night and day to justify that word.
"Monsieur, all I can promise is that when the time comes I shall remember you. But that promise I make now with my whole heart," said Hanaud warmly, and with a bow he moved away.
Maurice Thevenet watched him go.
"What a man!" Maurice Thevenet went on enthusiastically. "I would not like to try to keep any secrets from him. No, indeed!" Jim had heard that sentiment before on other lips and with a greater sympathy. "I did not understand at all what he had in his mind when he staged that little scene with Francine Rollard. But something, Monsieur. Oh, you may be sure. Something wise. And that search through the treasure room! How quick and complete! No doubt while we searched Mademoiselle Upcott's bedroom, he was just as quick and complete in going through her sitting-room. But he found nothing. No, nothing."
He waited for Jim to corroborate him, but Jim only said "Oho!"
But Thevenet was not to be extinguished.
"I shall tell you what struck me, Monsieur. He was following out no suspicions; isn't that so? He was detached. He was gathering up every trifle, on the chance that each one might sometime fit in with another and at last a whole picture be composed. An artist! There was a letter, for instance, which Mademoiselle Harlowe handed to him, one of those deplorable letters which have disgraced us here—you remember that letter, Monsieur?"
"Aha!" said Frobisher, quite in the style of Hanaud. "But I see that this film is coming to its wedding bells. So I shall wish you a good evening."
Frobisher bowed and left Maurice Thevenet to dream of success in Paris. He strolled between the groups of spectators to the entrance and thence into the street. He walked to the arch of the Porte Guillaume and turned into the Rue de la Liberté. The provincial towns go to bed early and the street so busy throughout the day was like the street of a deserted city. A couple of hundred yards on, he was startled to find Hanaud, sprung from nowhere, walking at his side.
"So my young friend, the secretary engaged you when I had gone?" he said.
"Maurice Thevenet," said Jim, "may be as the Commissary says a young man of a surprising intelligence, but to tell you the truth, I find him a very intrusive fellow. First of all he wanted to know if you had discovered anything in Ann Upcott's sitting-room, and then what Miss Harlowe's anonymous letter was about."
Hanaud looked at Jim with interest.
"Yes, he is anxious to learn, that young man, Girardot is right. He will go far. And how did you answer him?"
"I said 'Oho'! first, and then I said 'Aha'! just like a troublesome friend of mine when I ask him a simple question which he does not mean to answer."
Hanaud laughed heartily.
"And you did very well," he said. "Come, let us turn into this little street upon the right. It will take us to our destination."
"Wait!" whispered Jim eagerly. "Don't cross the road for a moment. Listen!"
Hanaud obeyed at once; and both men stood and listened in the empty street.
"Not a sound," said Hanaud.
"No! That is what troubles me!" Jim whispered importantly. "A minute ago there were footsteps behind us. Now that we have stopped they have stopped too. Let us go on quite straight for a moment or two."
"But certainly my friend," said Hanaud.
"And let us not talk either," Jim urged.
"Not a single word," said Hanaud.
They moved forward again and behind them once more footsteps rang upon the pavement.
"What did I tell you?" asked Jim, taking Hanaud by the arm.
"That we would neither of us speak," Hanaud replied. "And lo! you have spoken!"
"But why? Why have I spoken? Be serious, Monsieur," Jim shook his arm indignantly. "We are being followed."
Hanaud stopped dead and gazed in steady admiration at his junior colleague.
"Oh!" he whispered. "You have discovered that? Yes, it is true. We are being followed by one of my men who sees to it that we are not followed."
Frobisher shook Hanaud's arm off indignantly. He drew himself up stiffly. Then he saw Hanaud's mouth twitching and he understood that he was looking "proper."
"Oh, let us go and find Jean Cladel," he said with a laugh and he crossed the road. They passed into a network of small, mean streets. There was not a soul abroad. The houses were shrouded in darkness. The only sounds they heard were the clatter of their own footsteps on the pavement and the fainter noise of the man who followed them. Hanaud turned to the left into a short passage and stopped before a little house with a shuttered shop front.
"This is the place," he said in a low voice and he pressed the button in the pillar of the door. The bell rang with a shrill sharp whirr just the other side of the panels.
"We may have to wait a moment if he has gone to bed," said Hanaud, "since he has no servant in the house."
A minute or two passed. The clocks struck the half hour. Hanaud leaned his ear against the panels of the door. He could not hear one sound within the house. He rang again; and after a few seconds shutters were thrown back and a window opened on the floor above. From behind the window some one whispered:
"Who is there?"
"The police," Hanaud answered, and at the window above there was silence.
"No one is going to do you any harm," Hanaud continued, raising his voice impatiently. "We want some information from you. That's all."
"Very well." The whisper came from the same spot. The man standing within the darkness of the room had not moved. "Wait! I will slip on some things and come down."
The window and the shutter were closed again. Then through the chinks a few beams of light strayed out Hanaud uttered a little grunt of satisfaction.
"That animal is getting up at last. He must have some strange clients amongst the good people of Dijon if he is so careful to answer them in a whisper."
He turned about and took a step or two along the pavement and another step or two back like a man upon a quarter deck. Jim Frobisher had never known him so restless and impatient during these two days.
"I can't help it," he said in a low voice to Jim. "I think that in five minutes we shall touch the truth of this affair. We shall know who brought the arrow to him from the Maison Crenelle."
"If any one brought the arrow to him at all," Jim Frobisher added.
But Hanaud was not in the mood to consider ifs and possibilities.
"Oh, that!" he said with a shrug of the shoulders. Then he tapped his forehead. "I am like Waberski. I have it here that some one did bring the arrow to Jean Cladel."
He started once more his quarter-deck pacing. Only it was now a trot rather than a walk. Jim was a little nettled by the indifference to his suggestion. He was still convinced that Hanaud had taken the wrong starting point in all his inquiry. He said tartly:
"Well, if some one did bring the arrow here, it will be the same person who replaced the treatise on Sporanthus on its book shelf."
Hanaud came to a stop in front of Jim Frobisher. Then he burst into a low laugh.
"I will bet you all the money in the world that that is not true, and then Madame Harlowe's pearl necklace on the top of it. For after all it was not I who brought the arrow to Jean Cladel, whereas it was undoubtedly I who put back the treatise on the shelf."
Jim took a step back. He stared at Hanaud with his mouth open in a stupefaction.
"You?" he exclaimed.
"I," replied Hanaud, standing up on the tips of his toes. "Alone I did it."
Then his manner of burlesque dropped from him. He looked up at the shuttered windows with a sudden anxiety.
"That animal is taking longer than he need," he muttered. "After all, it is not to a court ball of the Duke of Burgundy that we are inviting him."
He rang the bell again with a greater urgency. It returned its shrill reply as though it mocked him.
"I do not like this," said Hanaud.
He seized the door-handle and leaned his shoulder against the panel and drove his weight against it. But the door was strong and did not give. Hanaud put his fingers to his mouth and whistled softly. From the direction whence they had come they heard the sound of a man running swiftly. They saw him pass within the light of the one street lamp at the corner and out of it again; and then he stood at their side. Jim recognised Nicolas Moreau, the little agent who had been sent this very morning by Hanaud to make sure that Jean Cladel existed.
"Nicolas, I want you to wait here," said Hanaud. "If the door is opened, whistle for us and keep it open."
"Very well, sir."
Hanaud said in a low and troubled voice to Frobisher: "There is something here which alarms me." He dived into a narrow alley at the side of the shop.
"It was in this alley no doubt that Waberski meant us to believe that he hid on the morning of the 7th of May," Jim whispered as he hurried to keep with his companion.
"No doubt."
The alley led into a lane which ran parallel with the street of Gambetta. Hanaud wheeled into it. A wall five feet high, broken at intervals by rickety wooden doors, enclosed the yards at the backs of the houses. Before the first of these breaks in the wall Hanaud stopped. He raised himself upon the tips of his toes and peered over the wall, first downwards into the yard, and then upwards towards the back of the house. There was no lamp in the lane, no light showing from any of the windows. Though the night was clear of mist it was as dark as a cavern in this narrow lane behind the houses. Jim Frobisher, though his eyes were accustomed to the gloom, knew that he could not have seen a man, even if he had moved, ten yards away. Yet Hanaud still stood peering at the back of the house with the tips of his fingers on the top of the wall. Finally he touched Jim on the sleeve.
"I believe the back window on the first floor is open," he whispered, and his voice was more troubled than ever. "We will go in and see."
He touched the wooden door and it swung inwards with a whine of its hinges.
"Open," said Hanaud. "Make no noise."
Silently they crossed the yard. The ground floor of the house was low. Jim looking upwards could see now that the window above their heads yawned wide open.
"You are right," he breathed in Hanaud's ear, and with a touch Hanaud asked for silence.
The room beyond the window was black as pitch. The two men stood below and listened. Not a word came from it. Hanaud drew Jim into the wall of the house. At the end of the wall a door gave admission into the house. Hanaud tried the door, turning the handle first and then gently pressing with his shoulder upon the panel.
"It's locked, but not bolted like the door in front," he whispered. "I can manage this."
Jim Frobisher heard the tiniest possible rattle of a bunch of keys as Hanaud drew it from his pocket, and then not a noise of any kind whilst Hanaud stooped above the lock. Yet within half a minute the door slowly opened. It opened upon a passage as black as that room above their heads. Hanaud stepped noiselessly into the passage. Jim Frobisher followed him with a heart beating high in excitement. What had happened in that lighted room upstairs and in the dark room behind it? Why didn't Jean Cladel come down and open the door upon the street of Gambetta? Why didn't they hear Nicolas Moreau's soft whistle or the sound of his voice? Hanaud stepped back past Jim Frobisher and shut the door behind them and locked it again.
"You haven't an electric torch with you, of course?" Hanaud whispered.
"No," replied Jim.
"Nor I. And I don't want to strike a match. There's something upstairs which frightens me."
You could hardly hear the words. They were spoken as though the mere vibration of the air they caused would carry a message to the rooms above.
"We'll move very carefully. Keep a hand upon my coat," and Hanaud went forward. After he had gone a few paces he stopped.
"There's a staircase here on my right. It turns at once. Mind not to knock your foot on the first step," he whispered over his shoulder; and a moment later, he reached down and, taking hold of Jim's right arm, laid his hand upon a balustrade. Jim lifted his foot, felt for and found the first tread of the stairs, and mounted behind Hanaud. They halted on a little landing just above the door by which they had entered the house.
In front of them the darkness began to thin, to become opaque rather than a black, impenetrable hood drawn over their heads. Jim understood that in front of him was an open door and that the faint glimmer came from that open window on their left hand beyond the door.
Hanaud passed through the doorway into the room. Jim followed and was already upon the threshold, when Hanaud stumbled and uttered a cry. No doubt the cry was low, but coming so abruptly upon their long silence it startled Frobisher like the explosion of a pistol. It seemed that it must clash through Dijon like the striking of a clock.
But nothing followed. No one stirred, no one cried out a question. Silence descended upon the house again, impenetrable, like the darkness a hood upon the senses. Jim was tempted to call out aloud himself, anything, however childish, so that he might hear a voice speaking words, if only his own voice. The words came at last, from Hanaud and from the inner end of the room, but in an accent which Jim did not recognise.
"Don't move! ... There is something.... I told you I was frightened.... Oh!" and his voice died away in a sigh.
Jim could hear him moving very cautiously. Then he almost screamed aloud. For the shutters at the window slowly swung to and the room was once more shrouded in black.
"Who's that?" Jim whispered violently, and Hanaud answered:
"It's only me—Hanaud. I don't want to show a light here yet with that window open. God knows what dreadful thing has happened here. Come just inside the room and shut the door behind you."
Jim obeyed, and having moved his position, could see a line of yellow light, straight and fine as if drawn by a pencil, at the other end of the room on the floor. There was a door there, a door into the front room where they had seen the light go up from the street of Gambetta.
Jim Frobisher had hardly realised that before the door was burst open with a crash. In the doorway, outlined against the light beyond, appeared the bulky frame of Hanaud.
"There is nothing here," he said, standing there blocking up the doorway with his hands in his pockets. "The room is quite empty."
That room, the front room—yes! But between Hanaud's legs the light trickled out into the dark room behind, and here, on the floor illuminated by a little lane of light, Jim, with a shiver, saw a clenched hand and a forearm in a crumpled shirt-sleeve.
"Turn round," he cried to Hanaud. "Look!"
Hanaud turned.
"Yes," he said quietly. "That is what I stumbled against."
He found a switch in the wall close to the door and snapped it down. The dark room was flooded with light, and on the floor, in the midst of a scene of disorder, a table pushed back here, a chair overturned there, lay the body of a man. He wore no coat. He was in his waistcoat and his shirt sleeves, and he was crumpled up with a horrible suggestion of agony like a ball, his knees towards his chin, his head forward towards his knees. One arm clutched the body close, the other, the one which Jim had seen, was flung out, his hand clenched in a spasm of intolerable pain. And about the body there was such a pool of blood as Jim Frobisher thought no body could contain.
Jim staggered back with his hands clasped over his eyes. He felt physically sick.
"Then he killed himself on our approach," he cried with a groan.
"Who?" answered Hanaud steadily.
"Jean Cladel. The man who whispered to us from behind the window."
Hanaud stunned him with a question.
"What with?"
Jim drew his hands slowly from before his face and forced his eyes to their service. There was no gleam of a knife, or a pistol, anywhere against the dark background of the carpet.
"You might think that he was a Japanese who had committed hari-kari," said Hanaud. "But if he had, the knife would be at his side. And there is no knife."
He stooped over the body and felt it, and drew his hand back.
"It is still warm," he said, and then a gasp, "Look!" He pointed. The man was lying on his side in this dreadful pose of contracted sinews and unendurable pain. And across the sleeve of his shirt there was a broad red mark.
"That's where the knife was wiped clean," said Hanaud.
Jim bent forward.
"By God, that's true," he cried, and a little afterwards, in a voice of awe: "Then it's murder."
Hanaud nodded.
"Not a doubt."
Jim Frobisher stood up. He pointed a shaking finger at the grotesque image of pain crumpled upon the floor, death without dignity, an argument that there was something horribly wrong with the making of the human race—since such things could be.
"Jean Cladel?" he asked.
"We must make sure," answered Hanaud. He went down the stairs to the front door and, unbolting it, called Moreau within the house. From the top of the stairs Jim heard him ask:
"Do you know Jean Cladel by sight?"
"Yes," answered Moreau.
"Then follow me."
Hanaud led him up into the back room. For a moment Moreau stopped upon the threshold with a blank look upon his face.
"Is that the man?" Hanaud asked.
Moreau stepped forward.
"Yes."
"He has been murdered," Hanaud explained. "Will you fetch the Commissary of the district and a doctor? We will wait here."
Moreau turned on his heel and went downstairs. Hanaud dropped into a chair and stared moodily at the dead body.
"Jean Cladel," he said in a voice of discouragement. "Just when he could have been of a little use in the world! Just when he could have helped us to the truth! It's my fault, too. I oughtn't to have waited until to-night. I ought to have foreseen that this might happen."
"Who can have murdered him?" Jim Frobisher exclaimed.
Hanaud roused himself out of his remorse.
"The man who whispered to us from behind the window," answered Hanaud.
Jim Frobisher felt his mind reeling.
"That's impossible!" he cried.
"Why?" Hanaud asked. "It must have been he. Think it out!" And step by step he told the story as he read it, testing it by speaking it aloud.
"At five minutes past ten a man of mine, still a little out of breath from his haste, comes to us in the Grande Taverne and tells us that Jean Cladel has just reached home. He reached home then at five minutes to ten."
"Yes," Jim agreed.
"We were detained for a few minutes by Maurice Thevenet. Yes." He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue and said softly: "We shall have to consider that very modest and promising young gentleman rather carefully. He detained us. We heard the clock strike half-past ten as we waited in the street."
"Yes."
"And all was over then. For the house was as silent as what, indeed, it is—a grave. And only just over, for the body is still warm. If this—lying here, is Jean Cladel, some one else must have been waiting for him to come home to-night, waiting in the lane behind, since my man didn't see him. And an acquaintance, a friend—for Jean Cladel lets him in and locks the door behind him."
Jim interrupted.
"He might have been here already, waiting for him with his knife bared in this dark room."
Hanaud looked around the room. It was furnished cheaply and stuffily, half office, half living-room. An open bureau stood against the wall near the window. A closed cabinet occupied the greater part of one side.
"I wonder," he said. "It is possible, no doubt—— But if so, why did the murderer stay so long? No search has been made—no drawers are ransacked." He tried the door of the cabinet. "This is still locked. No, I don't think that he was waiting. I think that he was admitted as a friend or a client—I fancy Jean Cladel had not a few clients who preferred to call upon him by the back way in the dark of the night. I think that his visitor came meaning to kill, and waited his time and killed, and that he had hardly killed before we rang the bell at the door." Hanaud drew in his breath sharply. "Imagine that, my friend! He is standing here over the man he has murdered, and unexpectedly the shrill, clear sound of the bell goes through the house—as though God said, 'I saw you!' Imagine it! He turned out the light and stands holding his breath in the dark. The bell rings again. He must answer it or worse may befall. He goes into the front room and throws open the window, and hears it is the police who are at the door." Hanaud nodded his head in a reluctant admiration. "But that man had an iron nerve! He doesn't lose his head. He closes the shutter, he turns on the light, that we may think he is getting up, he runs back into this room. He will not waste time by stumbling down the stairs and fumbling with the lock of the back door. No, he opens these shutters and drops to the ground. It is done in a second. Another second, and he is in the lane; another, and he is safe, his dreadful mission ended. Cladel will not speak. Cladel will not tell us the things we want to know."
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 Crenelle. 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.
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 Crenelle. 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 Crenelle. 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 Crenelle, 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 Crenelle, 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 Crenelle—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 Crenelle. 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 Crenelle 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.