"I cannot. I dare not," said Furneaux. "I have reason to believe that you carry a weapon, perhaps poison, concealed in your clothing."
"Idiot!" she screamed, now beside herself with rage, "what evidence can you produce against me? You will be the laughing stock of London, you and your arrests."
"Mrs. Bates knows now who it was she saw on the stairs," said Furneaux patiently. "Campbell, the driver of the taxicab, has recognized you as the person he drove to and from Feldisham Mansions. Mary Dean, the housemaid there, can say at last why she fancied that Mr. Osborne killed her mistress. But you'll hear these things in due course. At present you must come with me."
"Where to?"
"To Vine Street police-station."
"Shall I not be permitted to see Rupert?"
"No."
A tremor convulsed her lithe body. Then, and not till then, did she really understand that the apparently impossible had happened. Still, her extraordinary power of self-reliance came to her aid. She ceased to struggle, and appealed to Winter.
"This man is acting like a lunatic," she cried. "He says his wife was killed, and if that be true he is no fit person to conduct an inquiry into the innocence or guilt of those on whom he wreaks his vengeance. You know why I came here to-night—merely to prove how you had blundered in the past—yet you dare to turn my harmless acting into a justification of my arrest. Where are these people, Campbell and the woman, whose testimony you bring against me?"
Now, in putting that impassioned question, she was wiser than she knew. Furneaux was ever ready to take risks in applying criminal procedure that Winter fought shy of. He had seen more than one human vampire slip from his grasp because of some alleged unfairness on the part of the police, of which a clever counsel had made ingenious use during the defense. If Hylda Prout had been identified by others than Mrs. Bates, of whose presence alone she was aware, she had every right to be confronted with them. He turned aside and told the horrified Jenkins to bring the witnesses from the room in which they had taken refuge. As a matter of fact, Campbell and Mary Dean, in charge of Police Constable Johnson, had been concealed behind the curtains that draped the servants' passage, and Johnson had scarce been able to stifle the scream that rose to the housemaid's lips when she saw on the stairs the living embodiment of her mistress's murderer.