"Yes, indeed," said Waberski hopefully.
"As a preliminary of course," Hanaud added dryly, "a preliminary to the more serious and now inevitable procedure."
Waberski's gleam of hopefulness was extinguished.
"To be sure," he murmured, plucking at his lean throat nervously. "Cases must proceed."
"That is what they are there for," said Hanaud sententiously; and the door of the library was pushed open. Betty came into the room with Ann Upcott immediately behind her.
"You sent for me," she began to Hanaud, and then she saw Boris Waberski. Her little head went up with a jerk, her eyes smouldered. "Monsieur Boris," she said, and again she spoke to Hanaud. "Come to take possession, I suppose?" Then she looked round the room for Jim Frobisher, and exclaimed in a sudden dismay:
"But I understood that——" and Hanaud was just in time to stop her from mentioning any name.
"All in good time, Mademoiselle," he said quickly. "Let us take things in their order."
Betty took her old place in the window-seat. Ann Upcott shut the door and sat down in a chair a little apart from the others. Hanaud folded up his newspaper and laid it aside. On the big blotting-pad which was now revealed lay one of those green files which Jim Frobisher had noticed in the office of the Sûrété. Hanaud opened it and took up the top paper. He turned briskly to Waberski.
"Monsieur, you state that on the night of the 27th of April, this girl here, Betty Harlowe, did wilfully give to her adoptive mother and benefactress, Jeanne-Marie Harlowe, an overdose of a narcotic by which her death was brought about."