"I am afraid I cannot tell you," he said.
"Do you mean that you won't tell me?" Beatrice asked.
"I think you can trust me," Wilfrid went on. "I think you can allow me to know what is for the best. I must ask you to have patience for the present, to rest secure in the knowledge that whatever happens no harm will come to you. And why worry yourself with these things at such a time as this? You ought to be enjoying yourself like the other guests. There is no suggestion of tragedy in this brilliant scene?"
Beatrice leaned towards her companion.
"I am not so sure of it," she whispered. "At first I enjoyed it immensely. I had never seen anything like it before, and the brilliancy of the scene carried me quite out of myself. And yet I cannot help feeling that the trouble is here; in fact I have seen it for myself. Do you remember the night I sent for you when my uncle was hurt? I told you all about that skinny hand pushed through the broken piece of glass and how the hand was fishing for the latch with a piece of string. You haven't forgotten that?"
Wilfrid shook his head. He was not likely to forget Beatrice's story.
"But what connexion is there between that hand and such an assembly as this?" he asked.
"Because I have seen the hand here," Beatrice went on in the same intense whisper. "Half an hour ago one of my friends came up to me with the offer of an ice, and we went into one of the refreshment rooms. There were a lot of men crushing round the bar, most of them drinking champagne and laughing and chattering. I was gazing about in a thoughtless kind of way when three men came in together and asked for champagne. One was a little man with his back turned towards me, and I could not see his face. One of his companions with a chaffing remark leaned over the counter and took a glass of champagne, at the same time telling his diminutive companion that he had been saved the humiliation of standing on a chair to get it. And then as the little man's hand was stretched forward I recognized the yellow claw that I had seen groping for the latch in the conservatory."
CHAPTER XVII
THE DIAMOND MOTH