"Movements!" said Hanaud sharply; and with his voice his face seemed to sharpen too. "Here's a word which does not help us much. A procession moves. So does the chair if I push it. So does my hand if I cover a mouth and stop a cry. Is it that sort of movement you mean, Mademoiselle?"
Under the stern insistence of his questions Ann Upcott suddenly weakened.
"Oh, I am afraid so," she said with a loud cry, and she clapped her hands to her face. "I never understood until this morning when you spoke of how the arrow might be used. Oh, I shall never forgive myself. I stood in the darkness, a few yards away—no more—I stood quite still and listened and just beyond the lighted doorway Madame was being killed!" She drew her hands from her face and beat upon her knees with her clenched fists in a frenzy.
"'Yes, I believe that now!' Madame cried in the hoarse, harsh voice we knew: 'Stripped, eh? Stripped to the skin!' and she laughed wildly; and then came the sound, as though—yes, it might have been that!—as though she were forced down and held, and Madame's voice died to a mumble and then silence—and then the other voice in a low clear whisper, 'That will do now.' And all the while I stood in the darkness—oh!"
"What did you do after that clear whisper reached your ears?" Hanaud commanded. "Take your hands from your face, if you please, and let me hear."
Ann Upcott obeyed him. She flung her head back with the tears streaming down her face.
"I turned," she whispered. "I went out of the room. I closed the door behind me—oh, ever so gently. I fled."
"Fled? Fled? Where to?"
"Up the stairs! To my room."
"And you rang no bell? You roused no one? You fled to your room! You hid your head under the bed-clothes like a child! Come, come, Mademoiselle!"