“Where?” came the next question, still with that vital insistence.
“In this room.”
“Burke was here?” Mary's voice was suddenly cold, very dangerous. “What was he doing here?”
“Talking to my father.”
The seemingly simple answer appeared the last straw to the girl's burden of frenzied suspicion. Her voice cut fiercely into the quiet of the room, imperious, savage.
“Joe, turn on that light! I want to see the face of every man in this room.”
Something fatally significant in her voice set Garson a-leap to the switch, and, in the same second, the blaze of the chandelier flamed brilliantly over all. The others stood motionless, blinking in the sudden radiance—all save Griggs, who moved stealthily in that same moment, a little nearer the door into the passage, which was nearest to him.
But Mary's next words came wholly as a surprise, seemingly totally irrelevant to this instant of crisis. Yet they rang a-throb with an hysterical anxiety.
“Dick,” she cried, “what are those tapestries worth?” With the question, she pointed toward the draperies that shrouded the great octagonal window.
The young man was plainly astonished, disconcerted as well by the obtrusion of a sordid detail into the tragedy of the time.