He looked at her as if fascinated for a moment, and then nodded twice and very slowly.
“So have I,” she sighed in tones so low he could scarcely hear them.
“Oh, you, you also,” he muttered, almost suffocating.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes—perhaps the same as yours. My stepfather,” she breathed, “Mr. Deede Dawson.”
He watched her closely and moodily, but he did not speak.
“I was afraid—at first,” she whispered. “But I was wrong—quite wrong. It is as certain as it can be that he was in London at the time.”
From his pocket Dunn took out the handkerchief of hers that he had found near the body of the dead man.
“Is this yours?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “Yes, where did you get it?”
He did not answer, but he lifted his hands one after the other, and put them on her shoulder, with the fingers outspread to encircle her throat. It seemed to him that when she acknowledged the ownership of the handkerchief she acknowledged also the perpetration of the deed, and he became a little mad, and he had it in his mind that the slightest, the very slightest, pressure of his fingers on that soft, round throat would put it for ever out of her power to do such things again. Then for himself death would be easy and welcome, and there would be an end to all these doubts and fears that racked him with anguish beyond bearing.