"Yes ... I think so ... I noticed no difference ... Yes."
And Hanaud flung out his arms with a comic gesture of despair, and addressed the room.
"You understand now my little experiment. A voice that whispers! How shall one tell it from another voice that whispers! There is no intonation, no depth, no lightness. There is not even sex in a voice which whispers. We have no clue, no, not the slightest to the identity of the person who whispered, 'That will do now,' on the night when Madame Harlowe died." He waved his hand towards Monsieur Bex. "I will be glad if you will open now these cupboards, and Mademoiselle Harlowe will tell us, to the best of her knowledge, whether anything has been taken or anything disturbed."
Hanaud returned to the treasure room, leaving Monsieur Bex and Betty at their work, with the Commissary and his secretary to supervise them. Jim Frobisher followed him. He was very far from believing that Hanaud had truthfully explained the intention of his experiment. The impossibility of identifying a voice which whispers! Here was something with which Hanaud must have been familiar from a hundred cases! No, that interpretation would certainly not work. There was quite another true reason for this melodramatic little scene which he had staged. He was following Hanaud in the hope of finding out that reason, when he heard him speaking in a low voice, and he stopped inside the dressing-room close to the communicating door where he could hear every word and yet not be seen himself.
"Mademoiselle," Hanaud was saying to Ann Upcott, "there is something about this clock here which troubles you."
"Yes—of course it's nonsense.... I must be wrong.... For here is the cabinet and on it stands the clock."
Jim could gather from the two voices that they were both standing together close to the marquetry cabinet.
"Yes, yes," Hanaud urged. "Still you are troubled."
There was a moment's silence. Jim could imagine the girl looking from the clock to the door by which she had stood, and back again from the door to the clock. Surely that scene in the bedroom had been staged to extort some admission from Ann Upcott of the falsity of her story. Was he now, since the experiment had failed, resorting to another trick, setting a fresh trap?
"Well?" he asked insistently. "Why are you troubled?"