"Yes."
"It is all very curious, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud gravely, and "If it were only curious!" Jim Frobisher wished with all his heart. For Ann Upcott quailed before the detective's glance. It seemed to him that with another question from him, an actual confession would falter and stumble from her lips. A confession of complicity with Boris Waberski! And then? Jim caught a dreadful glimpse of the future which awaited her. The guillotine? Probably a fate much worse. For that would be over soon and she at rest. A few poignant weeks, an agony of waiting, now in an intoxication of hope, now in the lowest hell of terror; some dreadful minutes at the breaking of a dawn—and an end! That would be better after all than the endless years of sordid heart-breaking labour, coarse food and clothes, amongst the criminals of a convict prison in France.
Jim turned his eyes away from her with a shiver of discomfort and saw with a queer little shock that Betty was watching him with a singular intentness; as if what interested her was not so much Ann's peril as his feeling about it.
Meanwhile Ann had made up her mind.
"I shall tell you at once the little there is to tell," she declared. The words were brave enough, but the bravery ended with the words. She had provoked the short interrogatory with a clear challenge. She ended it in a hardly audible whisper. However, she managed to tell her story, leaning there against the post of the door. Indeed her voice strengthened as she went on and once a smile of real amusement flickered about her lips and in her eyes and set the dimples playing in her cheeks.
Up to eighteen months ago she had lived with her mother, a widow, in Dorsetshire, a few miles behind Weymouth. The pair of them lived with difficulty. For Mrs. Upcott found herself in as desperate a position as England provides for gentlewomen. She was a small landowner taxed up to her ears, and then rated over the top of her head. Ann for her part was thought in the neighbourhood to have promise as an artist. On the death of her mother the estate was sold as a toy to a manufacturer, and Ann with a small purse and a sack-load of ambitions set out for London.
"It took me a year to understand that I was and should remain an amateur. I counted over my money. I had three hundred pounds left. What was I going to do with it? It wasn't enough to set me up in a shop. On the other hand, I hated the idea of dependence. So I made up my mind to have ten wild gorgeous days at Monte Carlo and make a fortune, or lose the lot."
It was then that the smile set her eyes dancing.
"I should do the same again," she cried quite unrepentantly. "I had never been out of England in my life, but I knew a good deal of schoolgirl's French. I bought a few frocks and hats and off I went. I had the most glorious time. I was nineteen. Everything from the sleeping-cars to the croupiers enchanted me. I stayed at one of the smaller hotels up the hill. I met one or two people whom I knew and they introduced me into the Sporting Club. Oh, and lots and lots of people wanted to be kind to me!" she cried.
"That is thoroughly intelligible," said Hanaud dryly.