"Why?"
"Because it was unnecessary, and unnecessary questions are confusing things which had best be avoided altogether."
Jim did not believe one word of that explanation. He had too clear a recollection of the swift movement and the look with which Hanaud had checked him. Both had been unmistakably signs of alarm. Hanaud would not have been alarmed at the prospect of a question being asked, merely because the question was superfluous. There was another and, Jim was sure, a very compelling reason in Hanaud's mind. Only he could not discover it.
Besides, was the question superfluous?
"Surely," Hanaud replied. "Suppose that that young lady's hand had touched in the darkness the face of a man with its stubble, its tough skin, and the short hair of his head around it, bending down so low over hers, would not that have been the most vivid, terrifying thing to her in all the terrifying incident? Stretching out her hands carelessly above her head, she touches suddenly, unexpectedly, the face of a man? She could not have told her story at all without telling that. It would have been the unforgettable detail, the very heart of her terror. She touched the face of a man!"
Jim recognised that the reasoning was sound, but he was no nearer to the solution of his problem—why Hanaud so whole-heartedly objected to the question being asked. And then Hanaud made a quiet remark which drove it for a long time altogether out of Jim's speculations.
"Mademoiselle Ann touched the face of a woman in the darkness that night—if that night, in the darkness she touched a face at all."
Jim was utterly startled.
"You believe that she was lying to us?" he cried.
Hanaud shook a protesting hand in the air.