"Which seemed to come out of a vapouring mist, did it not?" Harold asked hoarsely. "By accident I loosened the spring, and as the frame rose your weight released you. Is not that so?"
Mrs. Benstein nodded; she had no words just for the moment. Now that the reaction had come she was feeling sick and faint with the pain. Harold's eyes were still distended with the horror of some awful discovery.
"It is very strange," he said. "Sir Clement did not mean to come back to you, for he has just left the house. He slipped out with some companion whose face I did not see. But your arm is painful. Nothing broken, I hope?"
Isa Benstein raised her lovely white arm to prove that such was not the case. But there was a round red band, and here and there a thin red stream came from the broken skin.
"Would you mind keeping this to yourself for the present?" Harold asked. "Believe me, there are urgent reasons why you should do so, reasons so urgent that I cannot go into them now. If you are silent we shall bring one of the greatest scoundrels to the gallows. If not——"
"I will be silent," Mrs. Benstein said, between her white set teeth. "But if you could get me away to see a doctor, or if there is a doctor here whom I could trust——"
"Of course there is, I must have been a fool not to have thought of it before. Sir James Brownsmith is the very man, and he is interested in the case too. Nobody is likely to come in here."
Harold hurried away in search of Brownsmith, whom he had seen a little while before. He found Angela and explained what he desired to her. He had hardly got back to the great conservatory before the great surgeon bustled in. Coolly enough Harold locked the door. There was no chance of Sir Clement coming back yet. In a few words he gave a brief outline of what had happened.
"It's part of the mystery," he said. "The same horrible mysterious force that brought that poor fellow at Streatham and Manfred to their death."
"Good God!" Sir James cried. "Do you mean to say that you have solved that mystery?"