"For you, Mademoiselle, yes. But for our little Boris—no!" Hanaud grinned with a mischievous anticipation. "I look forward to half an hour with that broken-kneed one. I shall talk to him and I shall not be dignified—no, not at all. I shall take care, too, that my good friend Monsieur Frobisher is not present. He would take from me all my enjoyment. He would look at me all prim like my maiden aunt and he would say to himself, 'Shocking! Oh, that comic! What a fellow! He is not proper.' No, and I shall not be proper. But, on the other hand, I will laugh all the way from Dijon to Paris."
Monsieur Hanaud had indeed begun to laugh already and Betty suddenly joined in with him. Hers was a clear, ringing laugh of enjoyment, and Jim fancied himself once more in the hall hearing that laughter come pealing through the open door.
"Ah, that is good!" exclaimed Hanaud. "You can laugh, Mademoiselle, even at my foolishnesses. You must keep Monsieur Frobisher here in Dijon and not let him return to London until he too has learnt that divinest of the arts."
Hanaud hitched his chair a little nearer, and a most uncomfortable image sprang at once into Jim Frobisher's mind. Just so, with light words and little jokes squeezed out to tenuity, did doctors hitch up their chairs to the bedsides of patients in a dangerous case. It took quite a few minutes of Hanaud's questions before that image entirely vanished from his thoughts.
"Good!" said Hanaud. "Now let us to business and get the facts all clear and ordered!"
"Yes," Jim agreed, and he too hitched his chair a little closer. It was curious, he reflected, how little he did know of the actual facts of the case.
"Now tell me, Mademoiselle! Madame Harlowe died, so far as we know, quite peacefully in her bed during the night."
"Yes," replied Betty.
"During the night of April the 27th?"
"Yes."