There was a silence.
"But how could anybody have exchanged the daggers?" wondered Ann Browning. "Eh?"
"I said," repeated Ann in a small but clear voice, "how could anybody have exchanged the daggers?"
They all turned to look at her.
For the first time they became conscious of her as a personality, because in these events she had (they remembered) not cried out, or whimpered, or fainted, or done anything they might have expected.
She was rather pale, and she had pushed her chair farther back from Arthur's body: no more. Her slim fingers plucked at the arms of the chair.
"You see—" She stopped as though confused, but presently went on. "The last person to touch the dagger was Mr. Fane himself. Wasn't it?"
Again there was a silence.
"It was," Sharpless said abruptly.
"He was sitting there," pursued Ann, puckering up her face, "with the revolver and the dagger in his hands. It was a rubber dagger then. Because I remember him twisting it back and forth."