“Indeed! Monsieur is, then, a magician—a juggler? This begins to be amusing. I should like to see this wonderful tome. But I should hope that your friends and clients and coconspirators have not been so daring as to forge written evidence against me? That would be too terrible, though I do not fear the worst they can do.”
“The volume is near at hand,” pursued Frank, his eyes never leaving her face for a second. As yet, every shot had told with fatal effect.
“Near at hand,” repeated the unhappy young woman mechanically. She felt certain now that she had been betrayed, and her suspicions fell on Finette, the French maid, whom she had always hated and mistrusted.
“Close at hand,” the lawyer said slowly, approaching a step toward her. “It lies in this house.”
“Do you mean to say that they have dared to place their forged papers within my own dwelling?” demanded Lucia Guiscardini, twisting and twining her fingers in and out of one another.
But she only spoke thus to delay the last fatal moment. Not knowing that he was proceeding chiefly upon guesswork, guided by that one swift gleam from her own eyes, she made sure he had certain information.
Finette had seen her open the cabinet, she thought, and had seen her examine the suspicious-looking volume. One hope remained: the girl might not know the secret of the spring opening the inner compartment where the book lay crouching amid laces and filmy handkerchiefs, placed there to deceive any casual eye that might happen to light upon the nook so cunningly devised.
“You cannot deny that the book is in this house—that you carry it about with you—that——”
“What?”
“That it is in this very room.”