"He said that to you?"
"His very words. I said to him, 'You don't mean that she recognised you?' 'She did,' he said. 'Then,' I said, 'we're in the soup.' 'She's got the bag,' he groaned; I could see that that was what worried him more than the recognition. Then something happened which turned his attention in another direction. You know as well as I do that the man who came into the hall with the bag, which he dropped on to the seat of that chair in his surprise at the sight of you, was Sydney Beaton."
CHAPTER XX
[The Leather Bag]
The girl had known it, but there was something brutal in the way the woman said it which affected her almost as if she had thrown something in her face; she shrank back--shivered. The woman seemed to be enjoying her obvious discomfiture; she smiled, as if the joke had grown still funnier.
"You see, that's what made me say that you had better think. Suppose you do give me away; after all, I'm not the person whom you saw in possession of the bag, and you did see someone. That someone was a gentleman friend, whose name, I am sure, you don't want to have shouted from the house-tops. Now do you?"
The girl seemed to be reflecting; her cheeks had grown whiter, trouble had come into her eyes; her bearing was in striking contrast to that of the woman in front of her, who could not have seemed to be more completely at her ease.
"How long have you known him?"
"Oh, some time. We've been in one or two little matters together, out of which we have done very well."
"You mean that this is not the first time, that he has done this sort of thing?"