“Are you ill?” asked Violet, and a certain aloofness of manner did not escape him.
“A small accident—” he told over again the history of his fall from a horse which had never borne him. Mrs. Mordaunt went out. Violet stood at a table, turning over the leaves of a book, while Van Hupfeldt searched her face under his anxious eyes, and there was a silence between them, until Violet, taking from her pocket David’s first unsigned note to her, held it out, saying: “It was you who sent me this?”
“I have told you so,” answered Van Hupfeldt, gray to the lips. “Why do you ask again?”
“Because I am puzzled,” she answered. “I have this morning received a note in this same handwriting, unless I am very much mistaken, a note from a certain Mr.—”
“Yes. Harcourt—Christian name David.”
“Quite so. David Harcourt—I can say it,” she answered quietly. “But how, then, comes it that your note and his are in the same handwriting?”
Van Hupfeldt’s lips opened and shut, his eyes shifted, and yet he chuckled with the uneasy mirth of a ghoul: “The solution of that puzzle doesn’t seem difficult to me.”
“You mean that you got Mr. Harcourt to write your note for you?” asked Violet.
“You are shrewdness itself,” answered Van Hupfeldt.