"Oh, but quite nice people too," Ann rejoined. Her face was glowing with the recollections of that short joyous time. She had forgotten, for the moment, altogether the predicament in which she stood, or she was acting with an artfulness which Hanaud could hardly have seen surpassed in all his experience of criminals.
"There was a croupier, for instance, at the trente-et-quarante table in the big room of the Sporting Club. I always tried to sit next to him. For he saw that no one stole my money and that when I was winning I insured my stake and clawed a little off the heap from time to time. I was there for five weeks and I had made four hundred pounds—and then came three dreadful nights and I lost everything except thirty pounds which I had stowed away in the hotel safe." She nodded across the hall towards Jim. "Monsieur Frobisher can tell you about the last night. For he sat beside me and very prettily tried to make me a present of a thousand francs."
Hanaud, however, was not to be diverted.
"Afterwards he shall tell me," he said, and resumed his questions. "You had met Waberski before that night?"
"Yes, a fortnight before. But I can't remember who introduced me."
"And Mademoiselle Harlowe?"
"Monsieur Boris introduced me a day or two later to Betty at tea-time in the lounge of the Hôtel de Paris."
"Aha!" said Hanaud. He glanced at Jim with an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. It was, indeed, becoming more and more obvious that Waberski had brought Ann Upcott into that household deliberately, as part of a plan carefully conceived and in due time to be fulfilled.
"When did Waberski first suggest that you should join Mademoiselle Harlowe?" he asked.
"That last night," Ann replied. "He had been standing opposite to me on the other side of the trente-et-quarante table. He saw that I had been losing."