She reached up and turned on the parlour light, and as she did so her loosely coiled hair tumbled about her shoulders. As the light struck down upon her features they had an appearance almost tragic.
“Be seated,” she said; it needed no expert eye to detect in her drawn lips the evidence of nervous tension.
“Madam,” said Leslie abruptly, snapping his jaws like a trap—and I knew this twenty-year-old girl was in for the third degree—“unless you at this time make a clean breast of all that you know concerning the murder of your employer, Ralph Monteagle, it will be necessary for me to book you for murder as an accessory before the fact.”
She started violently; her bosom began to rise and fall quickly; it was evident a breakdown was imminent, but she managed to say with considerable smoothness:
“I know nothing more than I have already told the police and the reporters.”
Lanagan, fierce eagerness glittering in his eyes, stepped before her.
“Nevertheless, possibly you know,” he said, biting each word off short, “how many persons beside yourself and Bartlett, Monteagle’s former chauffeur, who bought it, knew of the rope in his closet; knew that Monteagle had a morbid fear of being trapped in that building at night by fire; that he had had that fear since his friend Mervin was burned to death in the Baldwin Hotel fire; that he let no one know about the rope for fear of being ridiculed? How many persons, I say, besides yourself and Bartlett, knew the rope was there? And when you knew that that rope had disappeared, as you must have known it, why didn’t you tell the police? Why did you permit a man to lie in prison whom you in your heart feel is innocent?”
She sprang to her feet and threw both hands towards him as though warding off physical blows. She was trembling in intense agitation.
“Don’t! Don’t! for God’s sake, don’t!”
She sank back again into her chair, her face buried in her hands, rocking and moaning, with Lanagan standing over her, inexorable as Nemesis.