"You are very quiet, Little Mouse." Wolvert had come up silently behind her in the gathering gloom of the room. "Last night's excitement has depressed you?"
"On the contrary," she responded coolly. "I am sorry, of course, for Mrs. Atterbury's loss, but I am quiet because I have been thinking. So many things about the affair puzzle me."
"Indeed? What, for instance?" He flung himself into a chair and smiled up at her.
"Why it was that I did not hear the smash of that vase in your struggle, and why, although your hands were tied after you were chloroformed, of course, the burglar did not also gag you. It was no doubt an oversight on his part, but it impressed me as being odd."
The mocking smile had vanished and he was staring at her with a narrowed intensity of gaze as if to read her very soul. When he replied it was in a hurried, uneasy tone distinctly at variance with his usual aplomb.
"It was the crash of the vase that awakened you, perhaps, and the thief must have been frightened away. He left his tools, you know, and he probably did not dare stop to finish his work with me.—But I did not realize that we had such an efficient detective in our midst!"
He added the last sentence with deliberate intent and Betty met his gaze with a little mocking light in her own eyes.
"I think the burglar finished his work with you very thoroughly, Mr. Wolvert!"
Leaving him to ponder over the ambiguity of her remark she passed out to the hall just as Welch burst in at the side door, his ratlike eyes fairly starting from his head. Sheer panic was written upon his pasty face and he charged headlong up the stairs like a maddened beast.
Betty was torn with the conflict of hope and fear. Had he encountered Herbert on guard, or was the house already surrounded by officers of the law?