“Took measures! What?” Sir Charles jerked the words out impetuously.
“She followed him to the South of France, and found him in Florence. What she said I cannot guess, but the result was their visit here to-night. During our interview it came out, quite by accident, that some furniture was taken from her place to her brother’s on the morning of November 7, thus shifting the venue of Lady Dyke’s death—or imaginary death I must now say—from No. 12 Raleigh Mansions to No. 61. This discovery was as startling to Mrs. Hillmer as to us, for she forthwith protested that the whole affair arose from her fault, and practically asked the detective to arrest her on the definite charge of murder.”
“Pooh! The mania of an hysterical woman!”
“Possibly!”
“Why ‘possibly’? No one was murdered in her abode. Do you for a moment believe the monstrous insinuation?”
“No, not in that sense. But her brother was about to make some revelation regarding a third person when she appealed to him not to speak. What would have happened finally I do not know. At that critical moment my servant announced your arrival.”
“But what can Mrs. Hillmer have to conceal? She and her brother have been lost to Society since long before my marriage. Neither of them, so far as I know, has ever set eyes on my wife during the last seven years.”
“Yet Mrs. Hillmer must have had some powerful motive in acting as she did.”
“Is it not more than likely that she had a bad attack of nerves?”
“A woman who merely yields to nervous prostration behaves foolishly. This woman gave way to emotion, it is true, but it was strength, not weakness, that sustained her.”