The detective looked down kindly on her grey hairs and answered: “No, no, my good woman; that won’t do. One cannot conceal one crime by committing another. I myself would naturally not listen to your suggestion for a moment, but I am also convinced that Mr. Thorne, to whom you are so devoted, and who, I acknowledge, pleased me the very first sight I had of him—I am convinced that he would not agree for a moment to any such solution of the problem.”
“Then I can only hope that you will not find him in Venice,” replied Mrs. Bernauer, with utter despair in her voice and eyes.
“I am not at all certain that I will find him in Venice when I leave here to-morrow morning,” said Muller calmly.
“Oh! then you don’t want to find him! Oh God! how good, how inexpressibly good you are,” stammered the woman, seizing at some vague hope in her distraught heart.
“No, you are mistaken again, Mrs. Bernauer. I will find Mr. Thorne wherever he may be. But I may arrive in Venice too late to meet him there. He may already be on his way home.”
“On his way home?” cried the housekeeper in terror, staggering where she stood.
Muller led her gently to a chair. “Sit down here and listen to me calmly. This is what I mean. If Mr. Thorne has seen in the papers that a man has been arrested and accused of the murder of Leopold Winkler, then he will take the next train back and give himself up to the authorities. That he makes no such move as long as he thinks there is no suspicion on any one else, no possibility that any one else could suffer the consequences of his deed—is quite comprehensible—it is only natural and human.”
Adele Bernauer sighed deeply again and heavy tears ran down her cheeks, in strange contrast to the ghost of a smile that parted her lips and shone in her dimmed eyes.
“You know him better than I do,” she murmured almost inaudibly, “you know him better than I do, and I have known him for so long.”
A moment later Muller had parted from the housekeeper with a warm, sincere pressure of the hand.