“I wonder if I can trust you,” she said, meditatively, as she gazed at him, with an alluring intentness.
“You sure can,” returned Bobsy, but he consciously and conscientiously steeled himself against her witcheries.
“No, I don’t think I can,” she said, after a moment, and with a tiny sigh of disappointment, she looked away. “Go on; question me as you like.”
“Why can’t you trust me?”
“Oh, I trust you, as far as that goes. But I see you suspect me of killing Mr. Stannard.”
“And didn’t you?” Bobsy believed in the efficacy of sudden, direct questions.
But Miss Vernon was not taken off guard.
“No,” she said, quietly, “I didn’t. But when I say I didn’t, it implicates Mrs. Stannard, and I don’t want to do that. Can’t you tell me what to do?”
“Well, it’s this way. If Mrs. Stannard is the guilty person, you want it known, don’t you?”
“No, indeed! If Joyce Stannard killed her husband, she had a good reason for it, and I’d rather nobody’d know she did it.”