"I know that, but who's Hobbs?"
"A servant dismissed a month ago," was the other's answer.
"Then possibly you know the woman?" I asked, looking up.
"Yes, possibly I know the woman," he repeated, standing before her and staring into her white and desolate face. It took me a moment or two to finish my task of trussing the wrists of the sullen and sodden Hobbs. When I looked up the woman was on her feet, several steps nearer the door.
"Watch that woman!" I cried. "She's got a load of your loot on her!"
My words seemed merely to puzzle him. There was no answering alarm on his face.
"What do you mean?" he inquired. He seemed almost to resent my effort in his behalf. The woman's stare, too, seemed able to throw him into something approaching a comatose state, leaving him pale and helpless, as though her eye had the gift of some hypnotic power. It angered me to think that some mere accidental outward husk of respectability could make things so easy for her. Her very air of false refinement, I felt, would always render her viciousness double-edged in its danger.
"Search her!" I cried. "See what she's got under her waist there!"
He turned his back on me, deliberately, as though resenting my determination to dog him into an act that was distasteful to him.
"What have you there?" he asked her, without advancing any closer.