“You?—Guess? How—” She broke off, shaken, as so often before, by his air of complete assurance.
He looked at her with quizzical eyes.
“Shall I tell you?” he said tantalisingly. “Yes, I think I will.” He paused, then finished quietly: “I happened to be in Switzerland last spring—when you were.”
There was no misunderstanding the intentional significance with which he spoke—no evading the impression that some definitely evil menace lay behind the brief statement of commonplace fact. To Ann it seemed as though some horror, lurking in the shadows of the fire-lit room, had suddenly stirred and were creeping stealthily towards her—impalpable but deadly, nauseous as the poisonous miasma rising from some dark and fetid pool. She shrank back, instinctively putting out her hand as though to ward off whatever threatened.
“You—you?” she stammered.
“Even I”—blandly. His gaze fastened on her face. “I spent a couple of nights—at the Hotel de Loup.” Then, as she shrank still further away from him, he added lightly: “Dickens of a lonely place, too!”
“Then—then—” Ann’s throat felt dry and constricted, but she struggled for utterance. “Then it was you who told—”
“Yes,” he cut in quickly. “It was I who told Coventry about your little escapade up there with Tony Brabazon.”
“Ah—!” A choked cry broke from her lips, and she leaned helplessly against the wall behind her.
“It was all quite simple,” went on Brett coolly. “You see, I read the entry in the hotel register—and I happened to know that Brabazon had no sister.” He rattled glibly on, recounting the episode of the Hotel de Loup with much the same air of inward entertainment with which he had narrated it to Coventry himself. When he had finished he looked across at her with a kind of triumph, no whit ashamed of himself.