“You! Arrest you! What do you mean, Sarah? What have you to do with it? The police have come for me.”
Sarah was not less amazed and horrified than her mother.
“Nonsense; they can’t touch you,” she exclaimed. “You weren’t at the dance that night!”
“And you were? My girl, my poor girl, what have you been doing?”
“Sir Frank Tarleton knows. I have told him everything. I think he means to be friendly, but he can’t save me unless you speak out. She can speak safely, can’t she?” the daughter asked imploringly. “My mother isn’t in any danger?”
It was a question difficult to answer either way. Tarleton felt the eyes of both women searching his face, each with the same anxiety, though each on the other’s behalf.
“It is only right that I should let you know that Mrs. Weathered may be in danger. The letters which ought to be in her possession may contain the clue to your step-father’s murder.”
And now the scene became painful indeed to witness, as the mother and daughter stood facing each other with the questions in their eyes that they were too terrified to put. Both of them at some time had loved the murdered man; both of them, perhaps, had come to hate him. And now each had been shaken by a sudden revelation of the other’s hidden side. The mother had just caught an appalling glimpse into her daughter’s unknown relations with her step-father; the daughter had been staggered by the suggestion that her mother might have been his mortal enemy. And all the time, beneath these mutual dreads and suspicions it might be, these unconscious jealousies, there prevailed, stronger than any other feeling, that blind, unselfish love between mother and child which made both of them eager to thrust themselves into danger in the other’s place.
The parts had been reversed. It was Sarah who was now anxious to close her mother’s mouth and Mrs. Weathered who showed herself determined to speak. The skilful manipulator of human nature who had wrought up this dramatic situation knew that he had only to wait for the dénouement at which he had aimed.
He had not to wait long.