Hylda dashed the paper to the ground, put her foot on it, then catching it up, worried it in her hands to atoms which she threw into a waste-paper basket. Then she collapsed into a chair at her desk, her arms thrown heedlessly over some documents, and her face buried between them.
"I have gone too far, too far, too far——"
Now that her passion had burnt to ashes this was her thought. A crisis, it was clear, had come, and something had to be done, to be decided, now—that very day. Rosalind would surely tell Osborne what she, Hylda, had said, how she had acted, and then all would be up with Hylda, no hope left, her whole house in ruins about her, not one stone left standing on another. Either she must bind Osborne irrevocably to her at once, or her brain must devise some means of keeping Osborne and Rosalind from meeting—or both. But how achieve the apparently impossible? Osborne, she knew, was at that moment at Rosalind's residence, and if Rosalind was now going home ... they would meet! Hylda moved her buried head from side to side, woe-ridden, in the grip of a hundred fangs and agonies. She had boasted to Rosalind that she was not a whimpering housemaid, but of a better texture: and if that was an actual truth, the present moment must prove it. Yet she sat there with a buried head, weakly weeping....
Suddenly she thought of the words in Rosalind's note to Osborne, which she had thrown into the basket: "I have discovered that your purloined dagger has been in the possession of the late lady's-maid, Pauline.... I am now taking it to Inspector Furneaux's...."
That, then, was the person who had the dagger which had been so sought and speculated about—Pauline Dessaulx!
And at the recollection of the name, Hylda's racked brain, driven to invent, invented like lightning. Up she sprang, caught at her hat, and rushed away, pinning it on to her magnificent red hair in her flight, her eyes staring with haste. In the street she leapt into a motor-cab—to Soho.
She was soon there. As if pursued by furies she pelted up two foul staircases, and at a top back room, rapped pressingly, fiercely, with the clenched knuckles of both hands upon the panels. As a man in his shirt-sleeves, his braces dropped, smoking a cigarette, opened the door to her, she almost fell in on him, and the burning words burst from her tongue's tip:
"Antonio!—it's all up with Pauline—the dagger she did it with—has been found—by a woman—the same woman from Tormouth whom you and I tracked to Porchester Gardens—Pauline is in her employ probably—tell Janoc—he has wits—he may do something before it is too late—the woman has the dagger—in a motor-cab—in a long, narrow box—she is this instant taking it to Inspector Furneaux's house—if she lives, Pauline hangs—tell Janoc that, Antonio—don't stare—tell Janoc—it is she or Pauline—let him choose——"
"Grand Dieu!"
"Don't stare—don't stand—I'm gone."