A shriek burst from Estelle Jardine's white lips, and she turned to fly to him.
"Oh, no, no, my girl; you don't make another attempt," snapped out Cleek. "You thought you were safe this time, didn't you, and that the dead tell no tales, eh?"
Speaking, he had sprung with a sharp movement, and immediately there was a scream, a struggle, and a click of clamping handcuffs.
"Well, my sweet-voiced little traitress, so I've got one more of your precious gang, have I?" Cleek snapped out, triumphantly, staring down into her upturned face. "I suppose your precious brother, Gustave Borelle, is at the bottom of it. Oh, yes, you may shriek, you may scream, but I hadn't forgotten Nita Borelle any more than her brother had forgotten Cleek!"
"Cleek!" broke out Carlyle in a weak voice. And "Cleek!" chimed in Lady Beryl and her husband in one breath.
"Yes, just Cleek, Mr. Desmond. Mr. Carlyle, you must keep quiet and rest. I know the effects of that drug this she-devil used on you, and the reaction of the reviving antidote that I sent Mr. Narkom upstairs with. You must retire to your bed for a few days. I take it that you were busy with the accounts when that hypocrite"—he flashed a glance of contempt at the huddled figure of Nita Borelle—"came into the room."
"That is so," said Carlyle. "She said Lady Beryl wanted to know whether I liked a new scent, a bottle of which she had just opened. Like a guileless fool, I buried my face in the handkerchief, which was chock-full of chloroform; and then I felt a deadly stab in the shoulder, and an agony which caused me to faint. And that was the end."
"And might, indeed, have been the end if she had injected but a few more drops of the hellish compound," said Cleek, grimly.
"But how did the Eugenie pearl vanish with the other jewels? I had not got Mr. Desmond's message about putting it in the safe."