CHAPTER XX
WHAT MATTERED MOST
With that scream Harry's every nerve had become as tense as wire. In his mind's eye he saw her innocency tangled in this hideous web of burglary—perhaps of murder, her name on every lip, her face blazoned in every yellow extra, as the "woman in the case!" The crisis spelled now and he acted with swift instinct.
He snatched the black mask from the floor and adjusted it to his own face, then darted to the safe and jerked open its heavy door. While the retreating servant's alarm still echoed from the hallway of the empty wing, his fingers, with the swiftness of desperation, went searching the papers in the safe. He came almost instantly upon what he sought—a thin packet of letters, tied together with a small photographic plate, ticketed with the name "Beverly Allen."
Echo had shrunk back, was leaning now against the wall, thriving terror of him in her eyes. He came toward her.
"Here!" he said, his voice muffled by the mask. "The letters! Take them and go—go instantly!"
"He has—killed him!" she gasped. "Why do you—"
Harry was sick with apprehension. As in the instant of drowning the smothering intelligence sees pass in vivid review before it the innumerable mosaic of a busy life-time, so he saw, swiftly arrayed in the imminent climax, the perilous hazards by which she was surrounded. Suppose Craig was dead, and she were apprehended, the letters put in evidence, and she told the truth, word for word, as she knew it. If her own estimate of their significance was a correct one, might not the most sinister suspicion then rest upon her? And if, as seemed likely, she was wrong in that surmise—even were the presence of accidental burglars proven—what could explain her presence there, alone in Craig's midnight library? Would it not seem to the great sceptical, sophisticated world only a tale invented to cover the old hackneyed story of a woman's infatuation? Would it not ruin her? He thrust the packet into her shaking hands, seized her arm and dragged her to the hall.
"Quick!" he said, roughly. "The house is roused! Hurry—for heaven's sake!" He thrust her through the outer door. "Down the path to the gate! Go!"