"As soon as you've answered one question. Who is Anna Hilden?"
"I don't know any more than I told you before."
"I don't mean the right one, but the mock heroine of the Thiergarten scene to-day."
"I don't know anything about her."
Taking out my card case in which I had put Rudolff's statement, I unfolded the paper and laid it on the table. "Rudolff says here——"
He tried to snatch the paper, but I whipped it up in time, leaving only the card case in his hand. "Rudolff says here that you sent him to me so that he should point me out to her this afternoon. Now then, who is she?"
"I don't know anything about her," he repeated doggedly.
"I'll help your memory. She admitted to me that it was a put-up job and that the child was neither hers nor mine. That enough for you?"
But he stuck to his denial and nothing I could say moved him. The poison farce had apparently convinced him that his life was safe and he met all my threats with the same dogged answer.
I had to give it up in the end. "Very well, then, I shall have to get the whole story out of her. The police will do it, if I can't; so that it's only a matter of a day or two. Do you still refuse to own up?"