The Colonel, who, as it seemed to Clifford, had aged since the morning, got up slowly from his chair and stared at Clifford with haggard eyes.
“Hemming!” said he in a broken voice. “The detective! Wha-a-t is he here for?”
“You don’t understand, papa,” piped Miss Theodora’s bright, shrill voice. “I didn’t say he was here. But Mr. King tells me it is he who sends the man to knock at our doors and windows at night. Didn’t you, Mr. King?”
Clifford did not immediately answer. He saw that he was upon the threshold of a mystery, to which the staring eyes and trembling limbs of the unhappy old man before him seemed already to give him the clue. Without waiting for Clifford’s answer to her question, Miss Theodora suddenly went on again:
“You said you had just left Nell, Mr. King. Where was that?”
He hesitated. He was overwhelmed with a feeling of pity for these two forlorn people, shut up and barricaded within their poor tumbledown house. So that, although he certainly had a vague belief that the old Colonel was in some unknown way involved in the crimes which had made so great a stir, yet he longed for his escape as much, or almost as much, as he longed for Nell’s. So he answered in a troubled voice:
“I left her—in the hands of the police.”
There was the warning, if the Colonel needed it. The old man shook so much, as he heard the announcement, that Clifford began to fear the “stroke” which the police-sergeant had predicted.
Miss Theodora turned pale, and clasped her hands.
“The police!” she exclaimed, as if scarcely able to grasp the dreadful fact. And she twirled round, as if moved by a spring, to her father: “Papa!” she almost screamed, “if the police have arrested Nell, I shall be called to give evidence against her! I will never do it—never! I would die first!”