Anthony bowed. “I am at your service, Mrs. Prescott—command me. How can I help you?”
She repeated to him her previous words to us. Anthony knitted his brows.
“I appreciate,” he said, “the fact that you are speaking with intimate knowledge which makes what you say especially valuable—you are quite assured that your son had no shadow on his life when he came down here?”
“I am positive of it, Mr. Bathurst,” Mrs. Prescott replied. “Of course it may have been some phase of the robbery Mary has told me about, but something tells me it wasn’t—the cause lies outside that.” She shook her head.
“Pardon me, Mrs. Prescott,” interposed Anthony. “I should like to ask you a question—can you in any obscure or roundabout way connect your son—legitimately of course—with any previous jewel robbery?”
A look of amazement spread over her features.
Anthony continued quickly. “I’m afraid I’ve put it to you very awkwardly and clumsily—but this is what I’m driving at. Has he, for example, ever been stopping at a country house that has been robbed while he has been there? The kind of experience, we will say, that would cause him to be on the qui vive were he confronted a second time with the possibility?”
“I don’t altogether follow you, Mr. Bathurst,” she answered, “so I don’t know whether I can answer you satisfactorily—but I don’t know of any connection of the kind you have indicated.”
“I have a reason for asking,” he intervened quickly. “There is abundant circumstantial evidence that your son, on the evening of the murder, may have been outside the billiard room window—almost in the same spot as this man Webb. If it were he, what took him there?”
“If he were there, Mr. Bathurst,” said Mrs. Prescott, “you may depend upon it, that he had a good and honorable reason for going.”