The telegram fluttered from Jim's fingers to the floor. It was like a cry for help at night coming from a great distance.
"I must go, sir, by the night boat," he said.
"To be sure!" said Mr. Haslitt a little absently.
Jim, however, had enthusiasm enough for both. His chivalry was fired, as is the way with lonely men, by the picture his imagination drew. The little girl, Betty Harlowe! What age was she? Twenty-one! Not a day more. She had been wandering with all the proud indifference of her sex and youth, until suddenly she found her feet caught in some trap set by a traitor, and looked about her; and terror came and with it a wild cry for help.
"Girls never notice danger signals," he said. "No, they walk blindly into the very heart of catastrophe." Who could tell what links of false and cunning evidence Boris Waberski had been hammering away at in the dark, to slip swiftly at the right moment over her wrist and ankle? And with that question he was seized with a great discouragement.
"We know very little of Criminal Procedure, even in our own country, in this office," he said regretfully.
"Happily," said Mr. Haslitt with some tartness. With him it was the Firm first and last. Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt never went in to the Criminal Courts. Litigation, indeed, even of the purest kind was frowned upon. It is true there was a small special staff, under the leadership of an old managing clerk, tucked away upon an upper floor, like an unpresentable relation in a great house, which did a little of that kind of work. But it only did it for hereditary clients, and then as a favour.
"However," said Mr. Haslitt as he noticed Jim's discomfort, "I haven't a doubt, my boy, that you will be equal to whatever is wanted. But remember, there's something at the back of this which we here don't know."
Jim shifted his position rather abruptly. This cry of the old man was becoming parrot-like—a phrase, a formula. Jim was thinking of the girl in Dijon and hearing her piteous cry for help. She was not "snapping her the fingers" now.
"It's a matter of common sense," Mr. Haslitt insisted. "Take a comparison. Bath, for instance, would never call in Scotland Yard over a case of this kind. There would have to be the certainty of a crime first, and then grave doubt as to who was the criminal. This is a case for an autopsy and the doctors. If they call in this man Hanaud"—and he stopped.