Ann twisted her body from this side to that; she wrung her hands.
"I am afraid of it!" she moaned.
"And what is torturing you now, Mademoiselle, is remorse that you did not step silently forward and from the darkness of the treasure-room look through that lighted doorway." He spoke with a great consideration and his insight into her distress was in its way a solace to her.
"Yes," she exclaimed eagerly. "I told you this morning I could have hindered it. I didn't understand until this morning. You see, that night something else happened"; and now indeed stark fear drew the colour from her cheeks and shone in her eyes.
"Something else?" Betty asked with a quick indraw of her breath, and she shifted her chair a little so that she might face Ann. She was wearing a black coat over a white silk shirt open at the throat, and she took her handkerchief from a side pocket of the coat and drew it across her forehead.
"Yes, Mademoiselle," Hanaud explained. "It is clear that something else happened that night to your friend, something which, taken together with our talk this morning over the book of arrows, had made her believe that murder was done." He looked at Ann. "You went then to your room?"
Ann resumed her story.
"I went to bed. I was very—what shall I say?—disturbed by Madame's outburst, as I thought it. One never knew what was going to happen in this house. It was on my nerves. For a time I tumbled from side to side in my bed. I was in a fever. Then suddenly I was asleep, sound asleep. But only for a time. I woke up and it was still pitch dark in my room. There was not a thread of light from the shutters. I turned over from my side on to my back and I stretched out my arms above my head. As God is my Judge I touched a face——" and even after all these days the terror of that moment was so vivid and fresh to her that she shuddered and a little sob broke from her lips. "A face quite close to me bending over me, in silence. I drew my hands away with a gasp. My heart was in my throat. I lay just for a second or two dumb, paralysed. Then my voice came back to me and I screamed."
It was the look of the girl as she told her story perhaps more than the words she used; but something of her terror spread like a contagion amongst her hearers. Jim Frobisher's shoulders worked uneasily. Betty with her big eyes wide open, her breath suspended, hung upon Ann's narrative. Hanaud himself said:
"You screamed? I do not wonder."