The
House of the Arrow

A. E. W. MASON

New York
George H. Doran Company

THE HOUSE OF THE ARROW

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Books by A. E. W. MASON

THE WINDING STAIR
THE FOUR FEATHERS
THE SUMMONS
THE BROKEN ROAD
MIRANDA OF THE BALCONY
CLEMENTINA
THE TURNSTILE
THE TRUANTS
AT THE VILLA ROSE
RUNNING WATER
THE COURTSHIP OF MORRICE BUCKLER
THE PHILANDERERS
LAWRENCE CLAVERING
THE WATCHERS
A ROMANCE OF WASTDALE
ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY AND OTHER TALES
FROM THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE WORLD

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

ONE: [Letters of Mark]
TWO: [A Cry for Help]
THREE: [Servants of Chance]
FOUR: [Betty Harlowe]
FIVE: [Betty Harlowe Answers]
SIX: [Jim Changes His Lodging]
SEVEN: [Exit Waberski]
EIGHT: [The Book]
NINE: [The Secret]
TEN: [The Clock upon the Cabinet]
ELEVEN: [A New Suspect]
TWELVE: [The Breaking of the Seals]
THIRTEEN: [Simon Harlowe's Treasure-room]
FOURTEEN: [An Experiment and a Discovery]
FIFTEEN: [The Finding of the Arrow]
SIXTEEN: [Hanaud Laughs]
SEVENTEEN: [At Jean Cladel's]
EIGHTEEN: [The White Tablet]
NINETEEN: [A Plan Frustrated]
TWENTY: [A Map and the Necklace]
TWENTY-ONE: [The Secret House]
TWENTY-TWO: [The Corona Machine]
TWENTY-THREE: [The Truth About the Clock on the Marquetry Cabinet]
TWENTY-FOUR: [Ann Upcott's Story]
TWENTY-FIVE: [What Happened on the Night of the 27th]
TWENTY-SIX: [The Façade of Notre Dame]

THE HOUSE OF THE ARROW

CHAPTER ONE: Letters of Mark

Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt, the solicitors on the east side of Russell Square, counted amongst their clients a great many who had undertakings established in France; and the firm was very proud of this branch of its business.

"It gives us a place in history," Mr. Jeremy Haslitt used to say. "For it dates from the year 1806, when Mr. James Frobisher, then our very energetic senior partner, organised the escape of hundreds of British subjects who were detained in France by the edict of the first Napoleon. The firm received the thanks of His Majesty's Government and has been fortunate enough to retain the connection thus made. I look after that side of our affairs myself."

Mr. Haslitt's daily batch of letters, therefore, contained as a rule a fair number bearing the dark-blue stamp of France upon their envelopes. On this morning of early April, however, there was only one. It was addressed in a spidery, uncontrolled hand with which Mr. Haslitt was unfamiliar. But it bore the postmark of Dijon, and Mr. Haslitt tore it open rather quickly. He had a client in Dijon, a widow, Mrs. Harlowe, of whose health he had had bad reports. The letter was certainly written from her house, La Maison Crenelle, but not by her. He turned to the signature.

"Waberski?" he said, with a frown. "Boris Waberski?" And then, as he identified his correspondent, "Oh, yes, yes."

He sat down in his chair and read. The first part of the letter was merely flowers and compliments, but half-way down the second page its object was made clear as glass. It was five hundred pounds. Old Mr. Haslitt smiled and read on, keeping up, whilst he read, a one-sided conversation with the writer.

"I have a great necessity of that money," wrote Boris, "and——"

"I am quite sure of that," said Mr. Haslitt.

"My beloved sister, Jeanne-Marie——" the letter continued.

"Sister-in-law," Mr. Haslitt corrected.

"—cannot live for long, in spite of all the care and attention I give to her," Boris Waberski went on. "She has left me, as no doubt you know, a large share of her fortune. Already, then, it is mine—yes? One may say so and be favourably understood. We must look at the facts with the eyes. Expedite me, then, by the recommended post a little of what is mine and agree my distinguished salutations."

Haslitt's smile became a broad grin. He had in one of his tin boxes a copy of the will of Jeanne-Marie Harlowe drawn up in due form by her French notary at Dijon, by which every farthing she possessed was bequeathed without condition to her husband's niece and adopted daughter, Betty Harlowe. Jeremy Haslitt almost destroyed that letter. He folded it; his fingers twitched at it; there was already actually a tear at the edges of the sheets when he changed his mind.

"No," he said to himself. "No! With the Boris Waberskis one never knows," and he locked the letter away on a ledge of his private safe.

He was very glad that he had when three weeks later he read, in the obituary column of The Times, the announcement of Mrs. Harlowe's death, and received a big card with a very deep black border in the French style from Betty Harlowe inviting him to the funeral at Dijon. The invitation was merely formal. He could hardly have reached Dijon in time for the ceremony had he started off that instant. He contented himself with writing a few lines of sincere condolence to the girl, and a letter to the French notary in which he placed the services of the firm at Betty's disposal. Then he waited.

"I shall hear again from little Boris," he said, and he heard within the week. The handwriting was more spidery and uncontrolled than ever; hysteria and indignation had played havoc with Waberski's English; also he had doubled his demand.

"It is outside belief," he wrote. "Nothing has she left to her so attentive brother. There is something here I do not much like. It must be one thousand pounds now, by the recommended post. 'You have always had the world against you, my poor Boris,' she say with the tears all big in her dear eyes. 'But I make all right for you in my will.' And now nothing! I speak, of course, to my niece—ah, that hard one! She snap her the fingers at me! Is that a behaviour? One thousand pounds, mister! Otherwise there will be awkwardnesses! Yes! People do not snap them the fingers at Boris Waberski without the payment. So one thousand pounds by the recommended post or awkwardnesses"; and this time Boris Waberski did not invite Mr. Haslitt to agree any salutations, distinguished or otherwise, but simply signed his name with a straggling pen which shot all over the sheet.

Mr. Haslitt did not smile over this letter. He rubbed the palms of his hands softly together.

"Then we shall have to make some awkwardnesses too," he said hastily, and he locked this second letter away with the first. But Mr. Haslitt found it a little difficult to settle to his work. There was that girl out there in the big house at Dijon and no one of her race near her! He got up from his chair abruptly and crossed the corridor to the offices of his junior partner.

"Jim, you were at Monte Carlo this winter," he said.

"For a week," answered Jim Frobisher.

"I think I asked you to call on a client of ours who has a villa there—Mrs. Harlowe."

Jim Frobisher nodded. "I did. But Mrs. Harlowe was ill. There was a niece, but she was out."

"You saw no one, then?" Jeremy Haslitt asked.

"No, that's wrong," Jim corrected. "I saw a strange creature who came to the door to make Mrs. Harlowe's excuses—a Russian."

"Boris Waberski," said Mr. Haslitt.

"That's the name."

Mr. Haslitt sat down in a chair.

"Tell me about him, Jim."

Jim Frobisher stared at nothing for a few moments. He was a young man of twenty-six who had only during this last year succeeded to his partnership. Though quick enough when action was imperative, he was naturally deliberate in his estimates of other people's characters; and a certain awe he had of old Jeremy Haslitt doubled that natural deliberation in any matters of the firm's business. He answered at length.

"He is a tall, shambling fellow with a shock of grey hair standing up like wires above a narrow forehead and a pair of wild eyes. He made me think of a marionette whose limbs have not been properly strung. I should imagine that he was rather extravagant and emotional. He kept twitching at his moustache with very long, tobacco-stained fingers. The sort of man who might go off at the deep end at any moment."

Mr. Haslitt smiled.

"That's just what I thought."

"Is he giving you any trouble?" asked Jim.

"Not yet," said Mr. Haslitt. "But Mrs. Harlowe is dead, and I think it very likely that he will. Did he play at the tables?"

"Yes, rather high," said Jim. "I suppose that he lived on Mrs. Harlowe."

"I suppose so," said Mr. Haslitt, and he sat for a little while in silence. Then: "It's a pity you didn't see Betty Harlowe. I stopped at Dijon once on my way to the South of France five years ago when Simon Harlowe, the husband, was alive. Betty was then a long-legged slip of a girl in black silk stockings with a pale, clear face and dark hair and big eyes—rather beautiful." Mr. Haslitt moved in his chair uncomfortably. That old house with its great garden of chestnuts and sycamores and that girl alone in it with an aggrieved and half-crazed man thinking out awkwardnesses for her—Mr. Haslitt did not like the picture!

"Jim," he said suddenly, "could you arrange your work so that you could get away at short notice, if it becomes advisable?"

Jim looked up in surprise. Excursions and alarms, as the old stage directions have it, were not recognised as a rule by the firm of Frobisher & Haslitt. If its furniture was dingy, its methods were stately; clients might be urgent, but haste and hurry were words for which the firm had no use No doubt, somewhere round the corner, there would be an attorney who understood them. Yet here was Mr. Haslitt himself, with his white hair and his curious round face, half-babyish, half-supremely intelligent, actually advocating that his junior partner should be prepared to skip to the Continent at a word.

"No doubt I could," said Jim, and Mr. Haslitt looked him over with approbation.

Jim Frobisher had an unusual quality of which his acquaintances, even his friends, knew only the outward signs. He was a solitary person. Very few people up till now had mattered to him at all, and even those he could do without. It was his passion to feel that his life and the means of his life did not depend upon the purchased skill of other people; and he had spent the spare months of his life in the fulfilment of his passion. A half-decked sailing-boat which one man could handle, an ice-axe, a rifle, an inexhaustible volume or two like The Ring and the Book—these with the stars and his own thoughts had been his companions on many lonely expeditions; and in consequence he had acquired a queer little look of aloofness which made him at once noticeable amongst his fellows. A misleading look, since it encouraged a confidence for which there might not be sufficient justification. It was just this look which persuaded Mr. Haslitt now. "This is the very man to deal with creatures like Boris Waberski," he thought, but he did not say so aloud.

What he did say was:

"It may not be necessary after all. Betty Harlowe has a French lawyer. No doubt he is adequate. Besides"—and he smiled as he recollected a phrase in Waberski's second letter—"Betty seems very capable of looking after herself. We shall see."

He went back to his own office, and for a week he heard no more from Dijon. His anxiety, indeed, was almost forgotten when suddenly startling news arrived and by the most unexpected channel.

Jim Frobisher brought it. He broke into Mr. Haslitt's office at the sacred moment when the senior partner was dictating to a clerk the answers to his morning letters.

"Sir!" cried Jim, and stopped short at the sight of the clerk. Mr. Haslitt took a quick look at his young partner's face and said:

"We will resume these answers, Godfrey, later on."

The clerk took his shorthand notebook out of the room, and Mr. Haslitt turned to Jim Frobisher.

"Now, what's your bad news, Jim?"

Jim blurted it out.

"Waberski accuses Betty Harlowe of murder."

"What!"

Mr. Haslitt sprang to his feet. Jim Frobisher could not have said whether incredulity or anger had the upper hand with the old man, the one so creased his forehead, the other so blazed in his eyes.

"Little Betty Harlowe!" he said in a wondering voice.

"Yes. Waberski has laid a formal charge with the Prefect of Police at Dijon. He accuses Betty of poisoning Mrs. Harlowe on the night of April the twenty-seventh."

"But Betty's not arrested?" Mr. Haslitt exclaimed.

"No, but she's under surveillance."

Mr. Haslitt sat heavily down in his arm-chair at his table. Extravagant! Uncontrolled! These were very mild epithets for Boris Waberski. Here was a devilish malignity at work in the rogue, a passion for revenge just as mean as could be imagined.

"How do you know all this, Jim?" he asked suddenly.

"I have had a letter this morning from Dijon."

"You?" exclaimed Mr. Haslitt, and the question caught hold of Jim Frobisher and plunged him too among perplexities. In the first shock of the news, the monstrous fact of the accusation had driven everything else out of his head. Now he asked himself why, after all, had the news come to him and not to the partner who had the Harlowe estate in his charge.

"Yes, it is strange," he replied. "And here's another queer thing. The letter doesn't come from Betty Harlowe, but from a friend, a companion of hers, Ann Upcott."

Mr. Haslitt was a little relieved.

"Betty had a friend with her, then? That's a good thing." He reached out his hand across the table. "Let me read the letter, Jim."

Frobisher had been carrying it in his hand, and he gave it now to Jeremy Haslitt. It was a letter of many sheets, and Jeremy let the edges slip and flicker under the ball of his thumb.

"Have I got to read all this?" he said ruefully, and he set himself to his task. Boris Waberski had first of all accused Betty to her face. Betty had contemptuously refused to answer the charge, and Waberski had gone straight off to the Prefect of Police. He had returned in an hour's time, wildly gesticulating and talking aloud to himself. He had actually asked Ann Upcott to back him up. Then he had packed his bags and retired to an hotel in the town. The story was set out in detail, with quotations from Waberski's violent, crazy talk; and as the old man read, Jim Frobisher became more and more uneasy, more and more troubled.

He was sitting by the tall, broad window which looked out upon the square, expecting some explosion of wrath and contempt. But he saw anxiety peep out of Mr. Haslitt's face and stay there as he read. More than once he stopped altogether in his reading, like a man seeking to remember or perhaps to discover.

"But the whole thing's as clear as daylight," Jim said to himself impatiently. And yet—and yet—Mr. Haslitt had sat in that arm-chair during the better part of the day, during the better part of thirty years. How many men and women during those years had crossed the roadway below this window and crept into this quiet oblong room with their grievances, their calamities, their confessions? And had passed out again, each one contributing his little to complete the old man's knowledge and sharpen the edge of his wit? Then, if Mr. Haslitt was troubled, there was something in that letter, or some mission from it, which he himself in his novitiate had overlooked. He began to read it over again in his mind to the best of his recollection, but he had not got far before Mr. Haslitt put the letter down.

"Surely, sir," cried Jim, "it's an obvious case of blackmail."

Mr. Haslitt awoke with a little shake of his shoulders.

"Blackmail? Oh! that of course, Jim."

Mr. Haslitt got up and unlocked his safe. He took from it the two Waberski letters and brought them across the room to Jim.

"Here's the evidence, as damning as any one could wish."

Jim read the letters through and uttered a little cry of delight.

"The rogue has delivered himself over to us."

"Yes," said Mr. Haslitt.

But to him, at all events, that was not enough; he was still looking through the lines of the letter for something beyond, which he could not find.

"Then what's troubling you?" asked Frobisher.

Mr. Haslitt took his stand upon the worn hearthrug with his back towards the fire.

"This, Jim," and he began to expound. "In ninety-five of these cases out of a hundred, there is something else, something behind the actual charge, which isn't mentioned, but on which the blackmailer is really banking. As a rule it's some shameful little secret, some blot on the family honour, which any sort of public trial would bring to light. And there must be something of that kind here. The more preposterous Waberski's accusation is, the more certain it is that he knows something to the discredit of the Harlowe name, which any Harlowe would wish to keep dark. Only, I haven't an idea what the wretched thing can be!"

"It might be some trifle," Jim suggested, "which a crazy person like Waberski would exaggerate."

"Yes," Mr. Haslitt agreed. "That happens. A man brooding over imagined wrongs, and flighty and extravagant besides—yes, that might well be, Jim."

Jeremy Haslitt spoke in a more cheerful voice.

"Let us see exactly what we do know of the family," he said, and he pulled up a chair to face Jim Frobisher and the window. But he had not yet sat down in it, when there came a discreet knock upon the door, and a clerk entered to announce a visitor.

"Not yet," said Mr. Haslitt before the name of the visitor had been mentioned.

"Very good, sir," said the clerk, and he retired. The firm of Frobisher & Haslitt conducted its business in that way. It was the real thing as a firm of solicitors, and clients who didn't like its methods were very welcome to take their affairs to the attorney round the corner. Just as people who go to the real thing in the line of tailors must put up with the particular style in which he cuts their clothes.

Mr. Haslitt turned back to Jim.

"Let us see what we know," he said, and he sat down in the chair.

CHAPTER TWO: A Cry for Help

"Simon Harlow," he began, "was the owner of the famous Clos du Prince vineyards on the Côte-d'Or to the east of Dijon. He had an estate in Norfolk, this big house, the Maison Crenelle in Dijon, and a villa at Monte Carlo. But he spent most of his time in Dijon, where at the age of forty-five he married a French lady, Jeanne-Marie Raviart. There was, I believe, quite a little romance about the affair. Jeanne-Marie was married and separated from her husband, and Simon Harlowe waited, I think, for ten years until the husband Raviart died."

Jim Frobisher moved quickly and Mr. Haslitt, who seemed to be reading off this history in the pattern of the carpet, looked up.

"Yes, I see what you mean," he said, replying to Jim's movement. "Yes, there might have been some sort of affair between those two before they were free to marry. But nowadays, my dear Jim! Opinion takes a more human view than it did in my youth. Besides, don't you see, this little secret, to be of any value to Boris Waberski, must be near enough to Betty Harlowe—I don't say to affect her if published, but to make Waberski think that she would hate to have it published. Now Betty Harlowe doesn't come into the picture at all until two years after Simon and Jeanne-Marie were married, when it became clear that they were not likely to have any children. No, the love-affairs of Simon Harlowe are sufficiently remote for us to leave them aside."

Jim Frobisher accepted the demolition of his idea with a flush of shame.

"I was a fool to think of it," he said.

"Not a bit," replied Mr. Haslitt cheerfully. "Let us look at every possibility. That's the only way which will help us to get a glimpse of the truth. I resume, then. Simon Harlowe was a collector. Yes, he had a passion for collecting and a very catholic one. His one sitting-room at the Maison Crenelle was a perfect treasure-house, not only of beautiful things, but of out-of-the-way things too. He liked to live amongst them and do his work amongst them. His married life did not last long. For he died five years ago at the age of fifty-one."

Mr. Haslitt's eyes once more searched for recollections amongst the convolutions of the carpet.

"That's really about all I know of him. He was a pleasant fellow enough, but not very sociable. No, there's nothing to light a candle for us there, I am afraid."

Mr. Haslitt turned his thoughts to the widow.

"Jeanne-Marie Harlowe," he said. "It's extraordinary how little I know about her, now I come to count it up. Natural too, though. For she sold the Norfolk estate and has since passed her whole time between Monte Carlo and Dijon and—oh, yes—a little summer-house on the Côte-d'Or amongst her vineyards."

"She was left rich, I suppose?" Frobisher asked.

"Very well off, at all events," Mr. Haslitt replied. "The Clos du Prince Burgundy has a fine reputation, but there's not a great deal of it."

"Did she come to England ever?"

"Never," said Mr. Haslitt. "She was content, it seems, with Dijon, though to my mind the smaller provincial towns of France are dull enough to make one scream. However, she was used to it, and then her heart began to trouble her, and for the last two years she has been an invalid. There's nothing to help us there." And Mr. Haslitt looked across to Jim for confirmation.

"Nothing," said Jim.

"Then we are only left the child Betty Harlowe and—oh, yes, your correspondent, your voluminous correspondent, Ann Upcott. Who is she, Jim? Where did she spring from? How does she find herself in the Maison Crenelle? Come, confess, young man," and Mr. Haslitt archly looked at his junior partner. "Why should Boris Waberski expect her support?"

Jim Frobisher threw his arms wide.

"I haven't an idea," he said. "I have never seen her. I have never heard of her. I never knew of her existence until that letter came this morning with her name signed at the end of it."

Mr. Haslitt started up. He crossed the room to his table and, fixing his folding glasses on the bridge of his nose, he bent over the letter.

"But she writes to you, Jim," he objected. "'Dear Mr. Frobisher,' she writes. She doesn't address the firm at all"; and he waited, looking at Jim, expecting him to withdraw this denial.

Jim, however, only shook his head.

"It's the most bewildering thing," he replied. "I can't make head or tail of it"; and Mr. Haslitt could not doubt now that he spoke the truth, so utterly and frankly baffled the young man was. "Why should Ann Upcott write to me? I have been asking myself that question for the last half-hour. And why didn't Betty Harlowe write to you, who have had her affairs in your care?"

"Ah!"

That last question helped Mr. Haslitt to an explanation. His face took a livelier expression.

"The answer to that is in Waberski's, the second letter. Betty—she snap her fingers at his awkwardnesses. She doesn't take the charge seriously. She will have left it to the French notary to dispose of it. Yes—I think that makes Ann Upcott's letter to you intelligible, too. The ceremonies of the Law in a foreign country would frighten a stranger, as this girl is apparently, more than they would Betty Harlowe, who has lived for four years in the midst of them. So she writes to the first name in the title of the firm, and writes to him as a man. That's it, Jim," and the old man rubbed his hands together in his satisfaction.

"A girl in terror wouldn't get any comfort out of writing to an abstraction. She wants to know that she's in touch with a real person. So she writes, 'Dear Mr. Frobisher.' That's it! You can take my word for it."

Mr. Haslitt walked back to his chair. But he did not sit down in it; he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out of the window over Frobisher's head.

"But that doesn't bring us any nearer to finding out what is Boris Waberski's strong suit, does it? We haven't a clue to it," he said ruefully.

To both of the men, indeed, Mr. Haslitt's flat, unillumined narrative of facts, without a glimpse into the characters of any of the participants in the little drama, seemed the most unhelpful thing. Yet the whole truth was written there—the truth not only of Waberski's move, but of all the strange terrors and mysteries into which the younger of the two men was now to be plunged. Jim Frobisher was to recognise that, when, shaken to the soul, he resumed his work in the office. For it was interrupted now.

Mr. Haslitt, looking out of the window over his partner's head, saw a telegraph-boy come swinging across the square and hesitate in the roadway below.

"I expect that's a telegram for us," he said, with the hopeful anticipation people in trouble have that something from outside will happen and set them right.

Jim turned round quickly. The boy was still upon the pavement examining the numbers of the houses.

"We ought to have a brass plate upon the door," said Jim with a touch of impatience; and Mr. Haslitt's eyebrows rose half the height of his forehead towards his thick white hair. He was really distressed by the Waberski incident, but this suggestion, and from a partner in the firm, shocked him like a sacrilege.

"My dear boy, what are you thinking of?" he expostulated. "I hope I am not one of those obstinate old fogies who refuse to march with the times. We have had, as you know, a telephone instrument recently installed in the junior clerks' office. I believe that I myself proposed it. But a brass plate upon the door! My dear Jim! Let us leave that to Harley Street and Southampton Row! But I see that telegram is for us."

The tiny Mercury with the shako and red cord to his uniform made up his mind and disappeared into the hall below. The telegram was brought upstairs and Mr. Haslitt tore it open. He stared at it blankly for a few seconds, then without a word, but with a very anxious look in his eyes, he handed it to Jim Frobisher.

Jim Frobisher read:

Please, please, send some one to help me at once. The Prefect of Police has called in Hanaud, a great detective of the Sûrété in Paris. They must think me guilty.—Betty Harlowe.

The telegram fluttered from Jim's fingers to the floor. It was like a cry for help at night coming from a great distance.

"I must go, sir, by the night boat," he said.

"To be sure!" said Mr. Haslitt a little absently.

Jim, however, had enthusiasm enough for both. His chivalry was fired, as is the way with lonely men, by the picture his imagination drew. The little girl, Betty Harlowe! What age was she? Twenty-one! Not a day more. She had been wandering with all the proud indifference of her sex and youth, until suddenly she found her feet caught in some trap set by a traitor, and looked about her; and terror came and with it a wild cry for help.

"Girls never notice danger signals," he said. "No, they walk blindly into the very heart of catastrophe." Who could tell what links of false and cunning evidence Boris Waberski had been hammering away at in the dark, to slip swiftly at the right moment over her wrist and ankle? And with that question he was seized with a great discouragement.

"We know very little of Criminal Procedure, even in our own country, in this office," he said regretfully.

"Happily," said Mr. Haslitt with some tartness. With him it was the Firm first and last. Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt never went in to the Criminal Courts. Litigation, indeed, even of the purest kind was frowned upon. It is true there was a small special staff, under the leadership of an old managing clerk, tucked away upon an upper floor, like an unpresentable relation in a great house, which did a little of that kind of work. But it only did it for hereditary clients, and then as a favour.

"However," said Mr. Haslitt as he noticed Jim's discomfort, "I haven't a doubt, my boy, that you will be equal to whatever is wanted. But remember, there's something at the back of this which we here don't know."

Jim shifted his position rather abruptly. This cry of the old man was becoming parrot-like—a phrase, a formula. Jim was thinking of the girl in Dijon and hearing her piteous cry for help. She was not "snapping her the fingers" now.

"It's a matter of common sense," Mr. Haslitt insisted. "Take a comparison. Bath, for instance, would never call in Scotland Yard over a case of this kind. There would have to be the certainty of a crime first, and then grave doubt as to who was the criminal. This is a case for an autopsy and the doctors. If they call in this man Hanaud"—and he stopped.

He picked the telegram up from the floor and read it through again.

"Yes—Hanaud," he repeated, his face clouding and growing bright and clouding again like a man catching at and just missing a very elusive recollection. He gave up the pursuit in the end. "Well, Jim, you had better take the two letters of Waberski, and Ann Upcott's three-volume novel, and Betty's telegram"—he gathered the papers together and enclosed them in a long envelope—"and I shall expect you back again with a smiling face in a very few days. I should like to see our little Boris when he is asked to explain those letters."

Mr. Haslitt gave the envelope to Jim and rang his bell.

"There is some one waiting to see me, I think," he said to the clerk who answered it.

The clerk named a great landowner, who had been kicking his heels during the last half-hour in an undusted waiting-room with a few mouldy old Law books in a battered glass case to keep him company.

"You can show him in now," said Mr. Haslitt as Jim retired to his own office; and when the great landowner entered, he merely welcomed him with a reproach.

"You didn't make an appointment, did you?" he said.

But all through that interview, though his advice was just the precise, clear advice for which the firm was quietly famous, Mr. Haslitt's mind was still playing hide-and-seek with a memory, catching glimpses of the fringes of its skirt as it gleamed and vanished.

"Memory is a woman," he said to himself. "If I don't run after her she will come of her own accord."

But he was in the common case of men with women: he could not but run after her. Towards the end of the interview, however, his shoulders and head moved with a little jerk, and he wrote a word down on a slip of paper. As soon as his client had gone, he wrote a note and sent it off by a messenger who had orders to wait for an answer. The messenger returned within the hour and Mr. Haslitt hurried to Jim Frobisher's office.

Jim had just finished handing over his affairs to various clerks and was locking up the drawers of his desk.

"Jim, I have remembered where I have heard the name of this man Hanaud before. You have met Julius Ricardo? He's one of our clients."

"Yes," said Frobisher. "I remember him—a rather finnicking person in Grosvenor Square."

"That's the man. He's a friend of Hanaud and absurdly proud of the friendship. He and Hanaud were somehow mixed up in a rather scandalous crime some time ago—at Aix-les-Bains, I think. Well, Ricardo will give you a letter of introduction to him, and tell you something about him, if you will go round to Grosvenor Square at five this afternoon."

"Capital!" said Jim Frobisher.

He kept the appointment, and was told how he must expect to be awed at one moment, leaped upon unpleasantly at the next, ridiculed at a third, and treated with great courtesy and friendship at the fourth. Jim discounted Mr. Ricardo's enthusiasm, but he got the letter and crossed the Channel that night. On the journey it occurred to him that if Hanaud was a man of such high mark, he would not be free, even at an urgent call, to pack his bags and leave for the provinces in an instant. Jim broke his journey, therefore, at Paris, and in the course of the morning found his way to the Direction of the Sûrété on the Quai d'Horloge just behind the Palais de Justice.

"Monsieur Hanaud?" he asked eagerly, and the porter took his card and his letter of introduction. The great man was still in Paris, then, he thought with relief. He was taken to a long dark corridor, lit with electric globes even on that bright morning of early summer. There he rubbed elbows with malefactors and gendarmes for half an hour whilst his confidence in himself ebbed away. Then a bell rang and a policeman in plain clothes went up to him. One side of the corridor was lined with a row of doors.

"It is for you, sir," said the policeman, and he led Frobisher to one of the doors and opened it, and stood aside. Frobisher straightened his shoulders and marched in.

CHAPTER THREE: Servants of Chance

Frobisher found himself at one end of an oblong room. Opposite to him a couple of windows looked across the shining river to the big Théâtre du Chatelet On his left hand was a great table with a few neatly arranged piles of papers, at which a big, rather heavily-built man was sitting. Frobisher looked at that man as a novice in a duelling field might look at the master swordsman whom he was committed to fight; with a little shock of surprise that after all he appeared to be just like other men. Hanaud, on his side, could not have been said to have looked at Frobisher at all; yet when he spoke it was obvious that somehow he had looked and to very good purpose. He rose with a little bow and apologised.

"I have kept you waiting, Mr. Frobisher. My dear friend Mr. Ricardo did not mention your object in his letter. I had the idea that you came with the usual wish to see something of the underworld. Now that I see you, I recognise your wish is more serious."

Hanaud was a man of middle age with a head of thick dark hair, and the round face and shaven chin of a comedian. A pair of remarkably light eyes under rather heavy lids alone gave a significance to him, at all events when seen for the first time in a mood of good-will. He pointed to a chair.

"Will you take a seat? I will tell you, Mr. Frobisher, I have a very soft place in my heart for Mr. Ricardo, and a friend of his—— These are words, however. What can I do?"

Jim Frobisher laid down his hat and stick upon a side table and took the chair in front of Hanaud's table.

"I am partner in a firm of lawyers which looks after the English interests of a family in Dijon," he said, and he saw all life and expression smoothed out of Hanaud's face. A moment ago he had been in the company of a genial and friendly companion; now he was looking at a Chinaman.

"Yes?" said Hanaud.

"The family has the name of Harlowe," Jim continued.

"Oho!" said Hanaud.

The ejaculation had no surprise in it, and hardly any interest. Jim, however, persisted.

"And the surviving member of it, a girl of twenty, Betty Harlowe, has been charged with murder by a Russian who is connected with the family by marriage—Boris Waberski."

"Aha!" said Hanaud. "And why do you come to me, Mr. Frobisher?"

Jim stared at the detective. The reason of his coming was obvious.

And yet—he was no longer sure of his ground. Hanaud had pulled open a drawer in his table and was beginning to put away in it one of his files.

"Yes?" he said, as who should say, "I am listening."

"Well, perhaps I am under a mistake," said Jim. "But my firm has been informed that you, Monsieur Hanaud, are in charge of the case," he said, and Hanaud's movements were at once arrested. He sat with the file poised on the palm of his hand as though he was weighing it, extraordinarily still; and Jim had a swift impression that he was more than disconcerted. Then Hanaud put the file into the drawer and closed the drawer softly. As softly he spoke, but in a sleek voice which to Frobisher's ears had a note in it which was actually alarming.

"So you have been informed of that, Mr. Frobisher! And in London! And—yes—this is only Wednesday! News travels very quickly nowadays, to be sure! Well, your firm has been correctly informed. I congratulate you. The first point is scored by you."

Jim Frobisher was quick to seize upon that word. He had thought out upon his journey in what spirit he might most usefully approach the detective. Hanaud's bitter little remark gave him the very opening which he needed.

"But, Monsieur Hanaud, I don't take that point of view at all," he argued earnestly. "I am happy to believe that there is going to be no antagonism between us. For, if there were, I should assuredly get the worst of it. No! I am certain that the one wish you have in this matter is to get at the truth. Whilst my wish is that you should just look upon me as a very second-rate colleague who by good fortune can give you a little help."

A smile flickered across Hanaud's face and restored it to some of its geniality.

"It has always been a good rule to lay it on with a trowel," he observed. "Now, what kind of help, Mr. Frobisher?"

"This kind of help, Monsieur Hanaud. Two letters from Boris Waberski demanding money, the second one with threats. Both were received by my firm before he brought this charge, and both of course remain unanswered."

He took the letters from the long envelope and handed them across the table to Hanaud, who read them through slowly, mentally translating the phrases into French as he read. Frobisher watched his face for some expression of relief or satisfaction. But to his utter disappointment no such change came; and it was with a deprecating and almost regretful air that Hanaud turned to him in the end.

"Yes—no doubt these two letters have a certain importance. But we mustn't exaggerate it. The case is very difficult."

"Difficult!" cried Jim in exasperation. He seemed to be hammering and hammering in vain against some thick wall of stupidity. Yet this man in front of him wasn't stupid.

"I can't understand it!" he exclaimed. "Here's the clearest instance of blackmail that I can imagine——"

"Blackmail's an ugly word, Mr. Frobisher," Hanaud warned him.

"And blackmail's an ugly thing," said Jim. "Come, Monsieur Hanaud, Boris Waberski lives in France. You will know something about him. You will have a dossier."

Hanaud pounced upon the word with a little whoop of delight, his face broke into smiles, he shook a forefinger gleefully at his visitor.

"Ah, ah, ah, ah! A dossier! Yes, I was waiting for that word! The great legend of the dossiers! You have that charming belief too, Mr. Frobisher. France and her dossiers! Yes. If her coal-mines fail her, she can always keep warm by burning her dossiers! The moment you land for the first time at Calais—bourn! your dossier begins, eh? You travel to Paris—so! You dine at the Ritz Hotel—so! Afterwards you go where you ought not to go—so-o-o! And you go back late to the hotel very uncomfortable because you are quite sure that somewhere in the still night six little officials with black beards and green-shaded lamps are writing it all down in your dossier. But—wait!"

He suddenly rose from his chair with his finger to his lips, and his eyes opened wide. Never was a man so mysterious, so important in his mystery. He stole on tiptoe, with a lightness of step amazing in so bulky a man, to the door. Noiselessly and very slowly, with an alert, bright eye cocked at Frobisher like a bird's, he turned the handle. Then he jerked the door swiftly inwards towards him. It was the classic detection of the eavesdropper, seen in a hundred comedies and farces; and carried out with so excellent a mimicry that Jim, even in this office of the Sûrété, almost expected to see a flustered chambermaid sprawl heavily forward on her knees. He saw nothing, however, but a grimy corridor lit with artificial light in which men were patiently waiting. Hanaud closed the door again, with an air of intense relief.

"The Prime Minister has not overheard us. We are safe," he hissed, and he crept back to Frobisher's side. He stooped and whispered in the ear of that bewildered man:

"I can tell you about those dossiers. They are for nine-tenths the gossip of the concièrge translated into the language of a policeman who thinks that everybody had better be in prison. Thus, the concièrge says: This Mr. Frobisher—on Tuesday he came home at one in the morning and on Thursday at three in fancy dress; and in the policeman's report it becomes, 'Mr. Frobisher is of a loose and excessive life.' And that goes into your dossier—yes, my friend, just so! But here in the Sûrété—never breathe a word of it, or you ruin me!—here we are like your Miss Betty Harlowe, 'we snap us the fingers at those dossiers.'"

Jim Frobisher's mind was of the deliberate order. To change from one mood to another required a progression of ideas. He hardly knew for the moment whether he was upon his head or his heels. A minute ago Hanaud had been the grave agent of Justice; without a hint he had leaped to buffoonery, and with a huge enjoyment. He had become half urchin, half clown. Jim could almost hear the bells of his cap still tinkling. He simply stared, and Hanaud with a rueful smile resumed his seat.

"If we work together at Dijon, Monsieur Frobisher," he said with whimsical regret, "I shall not enjoy myself as I did with my dear little friend Mr. Ricardo at Aix. No, indeed! Had I made this little pantomime for him, he would have sat with the eyes popping out of his head. He would have whispered, 'The Prime Minister comes in the morning to spy outside your door—oh!' and he would have been thrilled to the marrow of his bones. But you—you look at me all cold and stony, and you say to yourself, 'This Hanaud, he is a comic!'"

"No," said Jim earnestly, and Hanaud interrupted the protest with a laugh.

"It does not matter."

"I am glad," said Jim. "For you just now said something which I am very anxious you should not withdraw. You held me out a hope that we should work together." Hanaud leaned forward with his elbows on his desk.

"Listen," he said genially. "You have been frank and loyal with me. So I relieve your mind. This Waberski affair—the Prefect at Dijon does not take it very seriously; neither do I here. It is, of course, a charge of murder, and that has to be examined with care."

"Of course."

"And equally, of course, there is some little thing behind it," Hanaud continued, surprising Frobisher with the very words which Mr. Haslitt had used the day before, though the one spoke in English and the other in French. "As a lawyer you will know that. Some little unpleasant fact which is best kept to ourselves. But it is a simple affair, and with these two letters you have brought me, simpler than ever. We shall ask Waberski to explain these letters and some other things too, if he can. He is a type, that Boris Waberski! The body of Madame Harlowe will be exhumed to-day and the evidence of the doctors taken, and afterwards, no doubt, the case will be dismissed and you can deal with Waberski as you please."

"And that little secret?" asked Jim.

Hanaud shrugged his shoulders.

"No doubt it will come to light. But what does that matter if it only comes to light in the office of the examining magistrate, and does not pass beyond the door?"

"Nothing at all," Jim agreed.

"You will see. We are not so alarming after all, and your little client can put her pretty head upon the pillow without any fear that an injustice will be done to her."

"Thank you, Monsieur Hanaud!" Jim Frobisher cried warmly. He was conscious of so great a relief that he himself was surprised by it. He had been quite captured by his pity for that unknown girl in the big house, set upon by a crazy rascal and with no champion but another girl of her own years. "Yes, this is good news to me."

But he had hardly finished speaking before a doubt crept into his mind as to the sincerity of the man sitting opposite to him. Jim did not mean to be played and landed like a silly fish, however inexperienced he might be. He looked at Hanaud and wondered. Was this present geniality of his any less assumed than his other moods? Jim was unsettled in his estimate of the detective. One moment a judge, and rather implacable, now an urchin, now a friend! Which was travesty and which truth? Luckily there was a test question which Mr. Haslitt had put only yesterday as he looked out from the window across Russell Square. Jim now repeated it.

"The affair is simple, you say?"

"Of the simplest."

"Then how comes it, Monsieur Hanaud, that the examining judge at Dijon still finds it necessary to call in to his assistance one of the chiefs of the Sûrété of Paris?"

The question was obviously expected, and no less obviously difficult to answer. Hanaud nodded his head once or twice.

"Yes," he said, and again "Yes," like a man in doubt. He looked at Jim with appraising eyes. Then with a rush, "I shall tell you everything, and when I have told you, you will give me your word that you will not betray my confidence to any one in this world. For this is serious."

Jim could not doubt Hanaud's sincerity at this moment, nor his friendliness. They shone in the man like a strong flame.

"I give you my word now," he said, and he reached out his hand across the table. Hanaud shook it. "I can talk to you freely, then," he answered, and he produced a little blue bundle of very black cigarettes. "You shall smoke."

The two men lit their cigarettes and through the blue cloud Hanaud explained:

"I go really to Dijon on quite another matter. This Waberski affair, it is a pretence! The examining judge who calls me in—see, now, you have a phrase for him," and Hanaud proudly dropped into English more or less. "He excuse his face! Yes, that is your expressive idiom. He excuse his face, and you will see, my friend, that it needs a lot of excusing, that face of his, yes. Now listen! I get hot when I think of that examining judge."

He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and, setting his sentence in order, resumed in French.

"The little towns, my friend, where life is not very gay and people have the time to be interested in the affairs of their neighbours, have their own crimes, and perhaps the most pernicious of them all is the crime of anonymous letters. Suddenly out of a clear sky they will come like a pestilence, full of vile charges difficult to refute and—who knows?—sometimes perhaps true. For a while these abominations flow into the letter-boxes and not a word is said. If money is demanded, money is paid. If it is only sheer wickedness which drives that unknown pen, those who are lashed by it none the less hold their tongues. But each one begins to suspect his neighbour. The social life of the town is poisoned. A great canopy of terror hangs over it, until the postman's knock, a thing so welcome in the sane life of every day, becomes a thing to shiver at, and in the end dreadful things happen."

So grave and quiet was the tone which Hanaud used that Jim himself shivered, even in this room whence he could see the sunlight sparkling on the river and hear the pleasant murmur of the Paris streets. Above that murmur he heard the sharp knock of the postman upon the door. He saw a white face grow whiter and still eyes grow haggard with despair.

"Such a plague has descended upon Dijon," Hanaud continued. "For more than a year it has raged. The police would not apply to Paris for help. No, they did not need help, they would solve this pretty problem for themselves. Yes, but the letters go on and the citizens complain. The police say, 'Hush! The examining magistrate, he has a clue. Give him time!' But the letters still go on. Then after a year comes this godsend of the Waberski affair. At once the Prefect of Police and the magistrate put their heads together. 'We will send for Hanaud over this simple affair, and he will find for us the author of the anonymous letters. We will send for him very privately, and if any one recognises him in the street and cries "There is Hanaud," we can say he is investigating the Waberski affair. Thus the writer of the letters will not be alarmed and we—we excuse our faces.' Yes," concluded Hanaud heatedly, "but they should have sent for me a year ago. They have lost a year."

"And during that year the dreadful things have happened?" asked Jim.

Hanaud nodded angrily.

"An old, lonely man who lunches at the hotel and takes his coffee at the Grande Taverne and does no harm to any one, he flings himself in front of the Mediterranean express and is cut to pieces. A pair of lovers shoot themselves in the Forêt des Moissonières. A young girl comes home from a ball; she says good night to her friends gaily on the doorstep of her house, and in the morning she is found hanging in her ball dress from a rivet in the wall of her bedroom, whilst in the hearth there are the burnt fragments of one of these letters. How many had she received, that poor girl, before this last one drove her to this madness? Ah, the magistrate. Did I not tell you? He has need to excuse his face."

Hanaud opened a drawer in his desk and took from it a green cover.

"See, here are two of those precious letters," and removing two typewritten sheets from the cover he handed them to Frobisher. "Yes," he added, as he saw the disgust on the reader's face, "those do not make a nice sauce for your breakfast, do they?"

"They are abominable," said Jim. "I wouldn't have believed——" he broke off with a little cry. "One moment, Monsieur Hanaud!" He bent his head again over the sheets of paper, comparing them, scrutinising each sentence. No, there were only the two errors which he had noticed at once. But what errors they were! To any one, at all events, with eyes to see and some luck in the matter of experience. Why, they limited the area of search at once!

"Monsieur Hanaud, I can give you some more help," he cried enthusiastically. He did not notice the broad grin of delight which suddenly transfigured the detective's face. "Help which may lead you very quickly to the writer of these letters."

"You can?" Hanaud exclaimed. "Give it to me, my young friend. Do not keep me shaking in excitement. And do not—oh! do not tell me that you have discovered that the letters were typed upon a Corona machine. For that we know already."

Jim Frobisher flushed scarlet. That is just what he had noticed with so much pride in his perspicuity. Where the text of a sentence required a capital D, there were instead the two noughts with the diagonal line separating them (thus, %), which are the symbol of "per cent."; and where there should have been a capital S lower down the page, there was the capital S with the transverse lines which stands for dollars. Jim was familiar with the Corona machine himself, and he had remembered that if one used by error the stop for figures, instead of the stop for capital letters, those two mistakes would result. He realised now, with Hanaud's delighted face in front of him—Hanaud was the urchin now—that the Sûrété was certain not to have overlooked those two indications even if the magistrate at Dijon had; and in a moment he began to laugh too.

"Well, I fairly asked for it, didn't I?" he said as he handed the letter back. "I said a wise thing to you, Monsieur, when I held it fortunate that we were not to be on opposite sides."

Hanaud's face lost its urchin look.

"Don't make too much of me, my friend, lest you be disappointed," he said in all seriousness. "We are the servants of Chance, the very best of us. Our skill is to seize quickly the hem of her skirt, when it flashes for the fraction of a second before our eyes."

He replaced the two anonymous letters in the green cover and laid it again in the drawer. Then he gathered together the two letters which Boris Waberski had written and gave them back to Jim Frobisher.

"You will want these to produce at Dijon. You will go there to-day?"

"This afternoon."

"Good!" said Hanaud. "I shall take the night express."

"I can wait for that," said Jim. But Hanaud shook his head.

"It is better that we should not go together, nor stay at the same hotel. It will very quickly be known in Dijon that you are the English lawyer of Miss Harlowe, and those in your company will be marked men too. By the way, how were you informed in London that I, Hanaud, had been put in charge of this case?"

"We had a telegram," replied Jim.

"Yes? And from whom? I am curious!"

"From Miss Harlowe."

For a moment Hanaud was for the second time in that interview quite disconcerted. Of that Jim Frobisher could have no doubt. He sat for so long a time, his cigarette half-way to his lips, a man turned into stone. Then he laughed rather bitterly, with his eyes alertly turned on Jim.

"Do you know what I am doing, Monsieur Frobisher?" he asked. "I am putting to myself a riddle. Answer it if you can! What is the strongest passion in the world? Avarice? Love? Hatred? None of these things. It is the passion of one public official to take a great big club and hit his brother official on the back of the head. It is arranged that I shall go secretly to Dijon so that I may have some little chance of success. Good! On Saturday it is so arranged, and already on Monday my colleagues have so spread the news that Miss Harlowe can telegraph it to you on Tuesday morning. But that is kind, eh? May I please see the telegram?"

Frobisher took it from the long envelope and handed it to Hanaud, who received it with a curious eagerness and opened it out on the table in front of them. He read it very slowly, so slowly that Jim wondered whether he too heard through the lines of the telegram, as through the receiver of a telephone, the same piteous cry for help which he himself had heard. Indeed, when Hanaud raised his face all the bitterness had gone from it.

"The poor little girl, she is afraid now, eh? The slender fingers, they do not snap themselves any longer, eh? Well, in a few days we make all right for her."

"Yes," said Jim stoutly.

"Meanwhile I tear this, do I not?" and Hanaud held up the telegraph form. "It mentions my name. It will be safe with you, no doubt, but it serves no purpose. Everything which is torn up here is burnt in the evening. It is for you to say," and he dangled the telegram before Jim Frobisher's eyes.

"By all means," said Jim, and Hanaud tore the telegram across. Then he placed the torn pieces together and tore them through once again and dropped them into his waste-paper basket. "So! That is done!" he said. "Now tell me! There is another young English girl in the Maison Crenelle."

"Ann Upcott," said Jim with a nod.

"Yes, tell me about her."

Jim made the same reply to Hanaud which he had made to Mr. Haslitt.

"I have never seen her in my life. I never heard of her until yesterday."

But whereas Mr. Haslitt had received the answer with amazement, Hanaud accepted it without comment.

"Then we shall both make the acquaintance of that young lady at Dijon," he said with a smile, and he rose from his chair.

Jim Frobisher had a feeling that the interview which had begun badly and moved on to cordiality was turning back upon itself and ending not too well. He was conscious of a subtle difference in Hanaud's manner, not a diminution in his friendliness, but—Jim could find nothing but Hanaud's own phrase to define the change. He seemed to have caught the hem of the skirt of Chance as it flickered for a second within his range of vision. But when it had flickered Jim could not even conjecture.

He picked up his hat and stick. Hanaud was already at the door with his hand upon the knob.

"Good-bye, Monsieur Frobisher, and I thank you sincerely for your visit."

"I shall see you in Dijon," said Jim.

"Surely," Hanaud agreed with a smile. "On many occasions. In the office, perhaps, of the examining magistrate. No doubt in the Maison Crenelle."

But Jim was not satisfied. It was a real collaboration which Hanaud had appeared a few minutes ago not merely to accept, but even to look forward to. Now, on the contrary, he was evading it.

"But if we are to work together?" Jim suggested.

"You might want to reach me quickly," Hanaud continued. "Yes. And I might want to reach you, if not so quickly, still very secretly. Yes." He turned the question over in his mind. "You will stay at the Maison Crenelle, I suppose?"

"No," said Jim, and he drew a little comfort from Hanaud's little start of disappointment. "There will be no need for that," he explained. "Boris Waberski can attempt nothing more. Those two girls will be safe enough."

"That's true," Hanaud agreed. "You will go, then, to the big hotel in the Place Darcy. For me I shall stay in one that is more obscure, and not under my own name. Whatever chance of secrecy is still left for me, that I shall cling to."

He did not volunteer the name of the obscure hotel or the name under which he proposed to masquerade, and Jim was careful not to inquire. Hanaud stood with his hand upon the knob of the door and his eyes thoughtfully resting upon Frobisher's face.

"I will trust you with a little trick of mine," he said, and a smile warmed and lit his face to good humour. "Do you like the pictures? No—yes? For me, I adore them. Wherever I go I snatch an hour for the cinema. I behold wonderful things and I behold them in the dark—so that while I watch I can talk quietly with a friend, and when the lights go up we are both gone, and only our empty bocks are left to show where we were sitting. The cinemas—yes! With their audiences which constantly change and new people coming in who sit plump down upon your lap because they cannot see an inch beyond their noses, the cinemas are useful, I tell you. But you will not betray my little secret?"

He ended with a laugh. Jim Frobisher's spirits were quite revived by this renewal of Hanaud's confidence. He felt with a curious elation that he had travelled a long way from the sedate dignities of Russell Square. He could not project in his mind any picture of Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt meeting a client in a dark corner of a cinema theatre off the Marylebone Road. Such manoeuvres were not amongst the firm's methods, and Jim began to find the change exhilarating. Perhaps, after all, Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt were a little musty, he reflected. They missed—and he coined a phrase, he, Jim Frobisher! ... they missed the ozone of police-work.

"Of course I'll keep your secret," he said with a thrill in his voice. "I should never have thought of so capital a meeting-place."

"Good," said Hanaud. "Then at nine o'clock each night, unless there is something serious to prevent me, I shall be sitting in the big hall of the Grande Taverne. The Grande Taverne is at the corner across the square from the railway station. You can't mistake it. I shall be on the left-hand side of the hall and close up to the screen and at the edge near the billiard-room. Don't look for me when the lights are raised, and if I am talking to any one else, you will avoid me like poison. Is that understood?"

"Quite," Jim returned.

"And you have now two secrets of mine to keep." Hanaud's face lost its smile. In some strange way it seemed to sharpen, the light-coloured eyes became very still and grave. "That also is understood, Monsieur Frobisher," he said. "For I begin to think that we may both of us see strange things before we leave Dijon again for Paris."

The moment of gravity passed. With a bow he held open the door. But Jim Frobisher, as he passed out into the corridor, was once again convinced that at some definite point in the interview Hanaud had at all events caught a glimpse of the flickering skirts of Chance, even if he had not grasped them in his hands.

CHAPTER FOUR: Betty Harlowe

Jim Frobisher reached Dijon that night at an hour too late for any visit, but at half-past nine on the next morning he turned with a thrill of excitement into the little street of Charles-Robert. This street was bordered upon one side, throughout its length, by a high garden wall above which great sycamores and chestnut trees rustled friendlily in a stir of wind. Towards the farther mouth of the street the wall was broken, first by the end of a house with a florid observation-window of the Renaissance period which overhung the footway; and again a little farther on by a pair of elaborate tall iron gates. Before these gates Jim came to a standstill. He gazed into the courtyard of the Maison Crenelle, and as he gazed his excitement died away and he felt a trifle ashamed of it. There seemed so little cause for excitement.

It was a hot, quiet, cloudless morning. On the left-hand side of the court women-servants were busy in front of a row of offices; at the end Jim caught glimpses of a chauffeur moving between a couple of cars in a garage, and heard him whistling gaily as he moved; on the right stretched the big house, its steep slate roof marked out gaily with huge diamond patterns of bright yellow, taking in the sunlight through all its open windows. The hall door under the horizontal glass fan stood open. One of the iron gates, too, was ajar. Even the sergent-de-ville in his white trousers out in the small street here seemed to be sheltering from the sun in the shadow of the high wall rather than exercising any real vigilance. It was impossible to believe, with all this pleasant evidence of normal life, that any threat was on that house or upon any of its inhabitants.

"And indeed there is no threat," Jim reflected. "I have Hanaud's word for it."

He pushed the gate open and crossed to the front door. An old serving-man informed him that Mademoiselle Harlowe did not receive, but he took Jim's card nevertheless, and knocked upon a door on the right of the big square hall. As he knocked, he opened the door; and from his position in the hall Jim looked right through a library to a window at the end and saw two figures silhouetted against the window, a man and a girl. The man was protesting, rather extravagantly both in word and gesture, to Jim's Britannic mind, the girl laughing—a clear, ringing laugh, with just a touch of cruelty, at the man's protestations. Jim even caught a word or two of the protest spoken in French, but with a curiously metallic accent.

"I have been your slave too long," the man cried, and the girl became aware that the door was open and that the old man stood inside of it with a card upon a silver salver. She came quickly forward and took the card. Jim heard the cry of pleasure, and the girl came running out into the hall.

"You!" she exclaimed, her eyes shining. "I had no right to expect you so soon. Oh, thank you!" and she gave him both her hands.

Jim did not need her words to recognise in her the "little girl" of Mr. Haslitt's description. Little in actual height Betty Harlowe certainly was not, but she was such a slender trifle of a girl that the epithet seemed in place. Her hair was dark brown in colour, with a hint of copper where the light caught it, parted on one side and very neatly dressed about her small head. The broad forehead and oval face were of a clear pallor and made vivid the fresh scarlet of her lips; and the large pupils of her grey eyes gave to her a look which was at once haunting and wistful. As she held out her hands in a warm gratitude and seized his, she seemed to him a creature of delicate flame and fragile as fair china. She looked him over with one swift comprehensive glance and breathed a little sigh of relief.

"I shall give you all my troubles to carry from now on," she said, with a smile.

"To be sure. That's what I am here for," he answered. "But don't take me for anything very choice and particular."

Betty laughed again and, holding him by the sleeve, drew him into the library.

"Monsieur Espinosa," she said, presenting the stranger to Jim. "He is from Cataluna, but he spends so much of his life in Dijon that we claim him as a citizen."

The Catalan bowed and showed a fine set of strong white teeth.

"Yes, I have the honour to represent a great Spanish firm of wine-growers. We buy the wines here to mix with our better brands, and we sell wine here to mix with their cheaper ones."

"You mustn't give your trade secrets away to me," Jim replied shortly. He disliked Espinosa on sight, as they say, and he was at no very great pains to conceal his dislike. Espinosa was altogether too brilliant a personage. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with black shining hair and black shining eyes, a florid complexion, a curled moustache, and gleaming rings upon his fingers.

"Mr. Frobisher has come from London to see me on quite different business," Betty interposed.

"Yes?" said the Catalan a little defiantly, as though he meant to hold his ground.

"Yes," replied Betty, and she held out her hand to him. Espinosa raised it reluctantly to his lips and kissed it.

"I shall see you when you return," said Betty, and she walked to the door.

"If I go away," Espinosa replied stubbornly. "It is not certain, Mademoiselle Betty, that I shall go"; and with a ceremonious bow to Jim he walked out of the room; but not so quickly but that Betty glanced swiftly from one man to the other with keen comparing eyes, and Jim detected the glance. She closed the door and turned back to Jim with a friendly little grimace which somehow put him in a good humour. He was being compared to another man to his advantage, and however modest one may be, such a comparison promotes a pleasant warmth.

"More trouble, Miss Harlowe," he said with a smile, "but this time the sort of trouble which you must expect for a good many years to come."

He moved towards her, and they met at one of the two side windows which looked out upon the courtyard. Betty sat down in the window-seat.

"I really ought to be grateful to him," she said, "for he made me laugh. And it seems to me ages since I laughed"; she looked out of the window and her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

"Oh! don't, please," cried Jim in a voice of trouble.

The smile trembled once more on Betty's lips deliciously.

"I won't," she replied.

"I was so glad to hear you laugh," he continued, "after your unhappy telegram to my partner and before I told you my good news."

Betty looked up at him eagerly.

"Good news?"

Jim Frobisher took once more from his long envelope the two letters which Waberski had sent to his firm and handed them to Betty.

"Read them," he said, "and notice the dates."

Betty glanced at the handwriting.

"From Monsieur Boris," she cried, and she settled down in the window-seat to study them. In her short black frock with her slim legs in their black silk stockings extended and her feet crossed, and her head and white neck bent over the sheets of Waberski's letters, she looked to Jim like a girl fresh from school. She was quick enough, however, to appreciate the value of the letters.

"Of course I always knew that it was money that Monsieur Boris wanted," she said. "And when my aunt's will was read and I found that everything had been left to me, I made up my mind to consult you and make some arrangement for him."

"There was no obligation upon you," Jim protested. "He wasn't really a relation at all. He married Mrs. Harlowe's sister, that's all."

"I know," replied Betty, and she laughed. "He always objected to me because I would call him 'Monsieur Boris' instead of 'uncle.' But I meant to do something nevertheless. Only he gave me no time. He bullied me first of all, and I do hate being bullied—don't you, Mr. Frobisher?"

"I do."

Betty looked at the letters again.

"That's when I snapped me the fingers at him, I suppose," she continued, with a little gurgle of delight in the phrase. "Afterwards he brought this horrible charge against me, and to have suggested any arrangement would have been to plead guilty."

"You were quite right. It would indeed," Jim agreed cordially.

Up to this moment, a suspicion had been lurking at the back of Jim Frobisher's mind that this girl had been a trifle hard in her treatment of Boris Waberski. He was a sponger, a wastrel, with no real claim upon her, it was true. On the other hand, he had no means of livelihood, and Mrs. Harlowe, from whom Betty drew her fortune, had been content to endure and support him. Now, however, the suspicion was laid, the little blemish upon the girl removed and by her own frankness.

"Then it is all over," Betty said, handing back the letters to Jim with a sigh of relief. Then she smiled ruefully—"But just for a little while I was really frightened," she confessed. "You see, I was sent for and questioned by the examining magistrate. Oh! I wasn't frightened by the questions, but by him, the man. I've no doubt it's his business to look severe, but I couldn't help thinking that if any one looked as terrifically severe as he did, it must be because he hadn't any brains and wanted you not to know. And people without brains are always dangerous, aren't they?"

"Yes, that wasn't encouraging," Jim agreed.

"Then he forbade me to use a motor-car, as if he expected me to run away. And to crown everything, when I came away from the Palais de Justice, I met some friends outside who gave me a long list of people who had been condemned and only found to be innocent when it was too late."

Jim stared at her.

"The brutes!" he cried.

"Well, we have all got friends like that," Betty returned philosophically. "Mine, however, were particularly odious. For they actually discussed, as a reason of course, why I should engage the very best advocate, whether, since Mrs. Harlowe had adopted me, the charge couldn't be made one of matricide. In which case there could be no pardon, and I must go to the guillotine with a black veil over my head and naked feet." She saw horror and indignation in Jim Frobisher's face and she reached out a hand to him.

"Yes. Malice in the provinces is apt to be a little blunt, though"—and she lifted a slim foot in a shining slipper and contemplated it whimsically—"I don't imagine that, given the circumstances, I should be bothering my head much as to whether I was wearing my best shoes and stockings or none at all."

"I never heard of so abominable a suggestion," cried Jim.

"You can imagine, at all events, that I came home a little rattled," continued Betty, "and why I sent off that silly panicky telegram. I would have recalled it when I rose to the surface again. But it was then too late. The telegram had——"

She broke off abruptly with a little rise of inflexion and a sharp indraw of her breath.

"Who is that?" she asked in a changed voice. She had been speaking quietly and slowly, with an almost humorous appreciation of the causes of her fear. Now her question was uttered quickly and anxiety was predominant in her voice. "Yes, who is that?" she repeated.

A big, heavily built man sauntering past the great iron gates had suddenly whipped into the courtyard. A fraction of a second before he was an idler strolling along the path, now he was already disappearing under the big glass fan of the porch.

"It's Hanaud," Jim replied, and Betty rose to her feet as though a spring in her had been released, and stood swaying.

"You have nothing to fear from Hanaud," Jim Frobisher reassured her. "I have shown him those two letters of Waberski. From first to last he is your friend. Listen. This is what he said to me only yesterday in Paris."

"Yesterday, in Paris?" Betty asked suddenly.

"Yes, I called upon him at the Sûrété. These were his words. I remembered them particularly so that I could repeat them to you just as they were spoken. 'Your little client can lay her pretty head upon her pillow confident that no injustice will be done to her.'"

The bell of the front door shrilled through the house as Jim finished.

"Then why is he in Dijon? Why is he at the door now?" Betty asked stubbornly.

But that was the one question which Jim must not answer. He had received a confidence from Hanaud. He had pledged his word not to betray it. For a little while longer Betty must believe that Waberski's accusation against her was the true reason of Hanaud's presence in Dijon, and not merely an excuse for it.

"Hanaud acts under orders," Jim returned. "He is here because he was bidden to come"; and to his relief the answer sufficed. In truth, Betty's thoughts were diverted to some problem to which he had not the key.

"So you called upon Monsieur Hanaud in Paris," she said, with a warm smile. "You have forgotten nothing which could help me." She laid a hand upon the sill of the open window. "I hope that he felt all the flattery of my panic-stricken telegram to London."

"He was simply regretful that you should have been so distressed."

"So you showed him the telegram?"

"And he destroyed it. It was my excuse for calling upon him with the letters."

Betty sat down again on the window-seat and lifted a finger for silence. Outside the door voices were speaking. Then the door was opened and the old man-servant entered. He carried this time no card upon a salver, but he was obviously impressed and a trifle flustered.

"Mademoiselle," he began, and Betty interrupted him. All trace of anxiety had gone from her manner. She was once more mistress of herself.

"I know, Gaston. Show Monsieur Hanaud in at once."

But Monsieur Hanaud was already in. He bowed with a pleasant ceremony to Betty Harlowe and shook hands cordially with Jim Frobisher.

"I was delighted as I came through the court, Mademoiselle, to see that my friend here was already with you. For he will have told you that I am not, after all, the ogre of the fairy-books."

"But you never looked up at the windows once," cried Betty in perplexity.

Hanaud smiled gaily.

"Mademoiselle, it is in the technique of my trade never to look up at windows and yet to know what is going on behind them. With your permission?" And he laid his hat and cane upon a big writing-table in the middle of the room.

CHAPTER FIVE: Betty Harlowe Answers

"But we cannot see even through the widest of windows," Hanaud continued, "what happened behind them a fortnight ago. In those cases, Mademoiselle, we have to make ourselves the nuisance and ask the questions."

"I am ready to answer you," returned Betty quietly.

"Oh, of that—not a doubt," Hanaud cried genially. "Is it permitted to me to seat myself? Yes?"

Betty jumped up, the pallor of her face flushed to pink.

"I beg your pardon. Of course, Monsieur Hanaud."

That little omission in her manners alone showed Jim Frobisher that she was nervous. But for it, he would have credited her with a self-command almost unnatural in her years.

"It is nothing," said Hanaud with a smile. "After all, we are—the gentlest of us—disturbing guests." He took a chair from the side of the table and drew it up close so that he faced Betty. But whatever advantage was to be gained from the positions he yielded to her. For the light from the window fell in all its morning strength upon his face, whilst hers was turned to the interior of the room.

"So!" he said as he sat down. "Mademoiselle, I will first give you a plan of our simple procedure, as at present I see it. The body of Madame Harlowe was exhumed the night before last in the presence of your notary."

Betty moved suddenly with a little shiver of revolt.

"I know," he continued quickly. "These necessities are distressing. But we do Madame Harlowe no hurt, and we have to think of the living one, you, Miss Betty Harlowe, and make sure that no suspicion shall rest upon you—no, not even amongst your most loyal friends. Isn't that so? Well, next, I put my questions to you here. Then we wait for the analyst's report. Then the Examining Magistrate will no doubt make you his compliments, and I, Hanaud, will, if I am lucky, carry back with me to that dull Paris, a signed portrait of the beautiful Miss Harlowe against my heart."

"And that will be all?" cried Betty, clasping her hands together in her gratitude.

"For you, Mademoiselle, yes. But for our little Boris—no!" Hanaud grinned with a mischievous anticipation. "I look forward to half an hour with that broken-kneed one. I shall talk to him and I shall not be dignified—no, not at all. I shall take care, too, that my good friend Monsieur Frobisher is not present. He would take from me all my enjoyment. He would look at me all prim like my maiden aunt and he would say to himself, 'Shocking! Oh, that comic! What a fellow! He is not proper.' No, and I shall not be proper. But, on the other hand, I will laugh all the way from Dijon to Paris."

Monsieur Hanaud had indeed begun to laugh already and Betty suddenly joined in with him. Hers was a clear, ringing laugh of enjoyment, and Jim fancied himself once more in the hall hearing that laughter come pealing through the open door.

"Ah, that is good!" exclaimed Hanaud. "You can laugh, Mademoiselle, even at my foolishnesses. You must keep Monsieur Frobisher here in Dijon and not let him return to London until he too has learnt that divinest of the arts."

Hanaud hitched his chair a little nearer, and a most uncomfortable image sprang at once into Jim Frobisher's mind. Just so, with light words and little jokes squeezed out to tenuity, did doctors hitch up their chairs to the bedsides of patients in a dangerous case. It took quite a few minutes of Hanaud's questions before that image entirely vanished from his thoughts.

"Good!" said Hanaud. "Now let us to business and get the facts all clear and ordered!"

"Yes," Jim agreed, and he too hitched his chair a little closer. It was curious, he reflected, how little he did know of the actual facts of the case.

"Now tell me, Mademoiselle! Madame Harlowe died, so far as we know, quite peacefully in her bed during the night."

"Yes," replied Betty.

"During the night of April the 27th?"

"Yes."

"She slept alone in her room that night?"

"Yes, Monsieur."

"That was her rule?"

"Yes."

"I understand Madame Harlowe's heart had given her trouble for some time."

"She had been an invalid for three years."

"And there was a trained nurse always in the house?"

"Yes."

Hanaud nodded.

"Now tell me, Mademoiselle, where did this nurse sleep? Next door to Madame?"

"No. A bedroom had been fitted up for her on the same floor but at the end of the passage."

"And how far away was this bedroom?"

"There were two rooms separating it from my aunt's."

"Large rooms?"

"Yes," Betty explained. "These rooms are on the ground-floor, and are what you would call reception-rooms. But, since Madame's heart made the stairs dangerous for her, some of them were fitted up especially for her use."

"Yes, I see," said Hanaud. "Two big reception-rooms between, eh? And the walls of the house are thick. It is not difficult to see that it was not built in these days. I ask you this, Mademoiselle. Would a cry from Madame Harlowe at night, when all the house was silent, be heard in the nurse's room?"

"I am very sure that it would not," Betty returned. "But there was a bell by Madame's bed which rang in the nurse's room. She had hardly to lift her arm to press the button."

"Ah!" said Hanaud. "A bell specially fitted up?"

"Yes."

"And the button within reach of the fingers. Yes. That is all very well, if one does not faint, Mademoiselle. But suppose one does! Then the bell is not very useful. Was there no room nearer which could have been set aside for the nurse?"

"There was one next to my aunt's room, Monsieur Hanaud, with a communicating door."

Hanaud was puzzled and sat back in his chair. Jim Frobisher thought the time had come for him to interpose. He had been growing more and more restless as the catechism progressed. He could not see any reason why Betty, however readily and easily she answered, should be needlessly pestered.

"Surely, Monsieur Hanaud," he said, "it would save a deal of time if we paid a visit to these rooms and saw them for ourselves."

Hanaud swung round like a thing on a swivel. Admiration beamed in his eyes. He gazed at his junior colleague in wonder.

"But what an idea!" he cried enthusiastically. "What a fine idea! How ingenious! How difficult to conceive! And it is you, Monsieur Frobisher, who have thought of it! I make you my distinguished compliments!" Then all his enthusiasm declined into lassitude. "But what a pity!"

Hanaud waited intently for Jim to ask for an explanation of that sigh, but Jim simply got red in the face and refused to oblige. He had obviously made an asinine suggestion and was being rallied for it in front of the beautiful Betty Harlowe, who looked to him for her salvation; and on the whole he thought Hanaud to be a rather insufferable person as he sat there brightly watching for some second inanity. Hanaud in the end had to explain.

"We should have visited those rooms before now, Monsieur Frobisher. But the Commissaire of Police has sealed them up and without his presence we must not break the seals."

An almost imperceptible movement was made by Betty Harlowe in the window; an almost imperceptible smile flickered for the space of a lightning-flash upon her lips; and Jim saw Hanaud stiffen like a watch-dog when he hears a sound at night.

"You are amused, Mademoiselle?" he asked sharply.

"On the contrary, Monsieur."

And the smile reappeared upon her face and was seen to be what it was, pure wistfulness. "I had a hope those great seals with their linen bands across the doors were all now to be removed. It is fanciful, no doubt, but I have a horror of them. They seem to me like an interdict upon the house."

Hanaud's manner changed in an instant.

"That I can very well understand, Mademoiselle," he said, "and I will make it my business to see that those seals are broken. Indeed, there was no great use in affixing them, since they were only affixed when the charge was brought and ten days after Madame Harlowe died." He turned to Jim. "But we in France are all tied up in red tape, too. However, the question at which I am driving does not depend upon any aspect of the rooms. It is this, Mademoiselle," and he turned back to Betty.

"Madame Harlowe was an invalid with a nurse in constant attendance. How is it that the nurse did not sleep in that suitable room with the communicating-door? Why must she be where she could hear no cry, no sudden call?"

Betty nodded her head. Here was a question which demanded an answer. She leaned forward, choosing her words with care.

"Yes, but for that, Monsieur, you must understand something of Madame my aunt and put yourself for a moment in her place. She would have it so. She was, as you say, an invalid. For three years she had not gone beyond the garden except in a private saloon once a year to Monte Carlo. But she would not admit her malady. No, she was in her mind strong and a fighter. She was going to get well, it was always a question of a few weeks with her, and a nurse in her uniform always near with the door open, as though she were in the last stages of illness—that distressed her." Betty paused and went on again. "Of course, when she had some critical attack, the nurse was moved. I myself gave the order. But as soon as the attack subsided, the nurse must go. Madame would not endure it."

Jim understood that speech. Its very sincerity gave him a glimpse of the dead woman, made him appreciate her tough vitality. She would not give in. She did not want the paraphernalia of malady always about her. No, she would sleep in her own room, and by herself, like other women of her age. Yes, Jim understood that and believed every word that Betty spoke. Only—only—she was keeping something back. It was that which troubled him. What she said was true, but there was more to be said. There had been hesitation in Betty's speech, too nice a choice of words and then suddenly a little rush of phrases to cover up the hesitations. He looked at Hanaud, who was sitting without a movement and with his eyes fixed upon Betty's face, demanding more from her by his very impassivity. They were both, Jim felt sure, upon the edge of that little secret which, according to Haslitt as to Hanaud was always at the back of such wild charges as Waberski brought—the little shameful family secret which must be buried deep from the world's eyes. And while Jim was pondering upon this explanation of Betty's manner, he was suddenly startled out of his wits by a passionate cry which broke from her lips.

"Why do you look at me like that?" she cried to Hanaud, her eyes suddenly ablaze in her white face and her lips shaking. Her voice rose to a challenge.

"Do you disbelieve me, Monsieur Hanaud?"

Hanaud raised his hands in protest. He leaned back in his chair. The vigilance of his eyes, of his whole attitude, was relaxed.

"I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle," he said with a good deal of self-reproach. "I do not disbelieve you. I was listening with both my ears to what you said, so that I might never again have to trouble you with my questions. But I should have remembered, what I forgot, that for a number of days you have been living under a heavy strain. My manner was at fault."

The small tornado of passion passed. Betty sank back in the corner of the window-seat, her head resting against the side of the sash and her face a little upturned.

"You are really very considerate, Monsieur Hanaud," she returned. "It is I who should beg your pardon. For I was behaving like a hysterical schoolgirl. Will you go on with your questions?"

"Yes," Hanaud replied gently. "It is better that we finish with them now. Let us come back to the night of the twenty-seventh!"

"Yes, Monsieur."

"Madame was in her usual health that night—neither better nor worse."

"If anything a little better," returned Betty.

"So that you did not hesitate to go on that evening to a dance given by some friends of yours?"

Jim started. So Betty was actually out of the house on that fatal night. Here was a new point in her favour. "A dance!" he cried, and Hanaud lifted his hand.

"If you please, Monsieur Frobisher!" he said. "Let Mademoiselle speak!"

"I did not hesitate," Betty explained. "The life of the household had to go on normally. It would never have done for me to do unusual things. Madame was quick to notice. I think that although she would not admit that she was dangerously ill, at the bottom of her mind she suspected that she was; and one had to be careful not to alarm her."

"By such acts, for instance, as staying away from a dance to which she knew that you had meant to go?" said Hanaud. "Yes, Mademoiselle. I quite understand that."

He cocked his head at Jim Frobisher, and added with a smile, "Ah, you did not know that, Monsieur Frobisher. No, nor our friend Boris Waberski, I think. Or he would hardly have rushed to the Prefect of Police in such a hurry. Yes, Mademoiselle was dancing with her friends on this night when she is supposed to be committing the most monstrous of crimes. By the way, Mademoiselle, where was Boris Waberski on the night of the 27th?"

"He was away," returned Betty. "He went away on the 25th to fish for trout at a village on the River Ouche, and he did not come back until the morning of the 28th."

"Exactly," said Hanaud. "What a type that fellow! Let us hope he had a better landing-net for his trout than the one he prepared so hastily for Mademoiselle Harlowe. Otherwise his three days' sport cannot have amounted to much."

His laugh and his words called up a faint smile upon Betty's face and then he swept back to his questions.

"So you went to a dance, Mademoiselle. Where?"

"At the house of Monsieur de Pouillac on the Boulevard Thiers."

"And at what hour did you go?"

"I left this house at five minutes to nine."

"You are sure of the hour?"

"Quite," said Betty.

"Did you see Madame Harlowe before you went?"

"Yes," Betty answered. "I went to her room just before I left. She took her dinner in bed, as she often did. I was wearing for the dance a new frock which I had bought this winter at Monte Carlo, and I went to her room to show her how I looked in it."

"Was Madame alone?"

"No; the nurse was with her."

And upon that Hanaud smiled with a great appearance of cunning.

"I knew that, Mademoiselle," he declared with a friendly grin. "See, I set a little trap for you. For I have here the evidence of the nurse herself, Jeanne Baudin."

He took out from his pocket a sheet of paper upon which a paragraph was typed. "Yes, the examining magistrate sent for her and took her statement."

"I didn't know that," said Betty. "Jeanne left us the day of the funeral and went home. I have not seen her since."

She nodded at Hanaud once or twice with a little smile of appreciation.

"I would not like to be a person with a secret to hide from you, Monsieur Hanaud," she said admiringly. "I do not think that I should be able to hide it for long."

Hanaud expanded under the flattery like a novice, and, to Jim Frobisher's thinking, rather like a very vulgar novice.

"You are wise, Mademoiselle," he exclaimed. "For, after all, I am Hanaud. There is only one," and he thumped his chest and beamed delightedly. "Heavens, these are politenesses! Let us get on. This is what the nurse declared," and he read aloud from his sheet of paper:

"Mademoiselle came to the bedroom, so that Madame might admire her in her new frock of silver tissue and her silver slippers. Mademoiselle arranged the pillows and saw that Madame had her favourite books and her drink beside the bed. Then she wished her good night, and with her pretty frock rustling and gleaming, she tripped out of the room. As soon as the door was closed, Madame said to me——" and Hanaud broke off abruptly. "But that does not matter," he said in a hurry.

Suddenly and sharply Betty leaned forward.

"Does it not, Monsieur?" she asked, her eyes fixed upon his face, and the blood mounting slowly into her pale cheeks.

"No," said Hanaud, and he began to fold the sheet of paper.

"What does the nurse report that Madame said to her about me, as soon as the door was closed?" Betty asked, measuring out her words with a slow insistence. "Come, Monsieur! I have a right to know," and she held out her hand for the paper.

"You shall judge for yourself that it was of no importance," said Hanaud. "Listen!" and once more he read.

"Madame said to me, looking at her clock, 'It is well that Mademoiselle has gone early. For Dijon is not Paris, and unless you go in time there are no partners for you to dance with.' It was then ten minutes to nine."

With a smile Hanaud gave the paper into Betty's hand; and she bent her head over it swiftly, as though she doubted whether what he had recited was really written on that sheet, as if she rather trembled to think what Mrs. Harlowe had said of her after she had gone from the room. She took only a second or two to glance over the page, but when she handed it back to him, her manner was quite changed.

"Thank you," she said with a note of bitterness, and her deep eyes gleamed with resentment. Jim understood the change and sympathised with it. Hanaud had spoken of setting a trap when he had set none. For there was no conceivable reason why she should hesitate to admit that she had seen Mrs. Harlowe in the presence of the nurse, and wished her good night before she went to the party. But he had set a real trap a minute afterwards and into that Betty had straightway stumbled. He had tricked her into admitting a dread that Mrs. Harlowe might have spoken of her in disparagement or even in horror after she had left the bedroom.

"You must know, Monsieur Hanaud," she explained very coldly, "that women are not always very generous to one another, and sometimes have not the imagination—how shall I put it?—to visualise the possible consequences of things they may say with merely the intention to hurt and do a little harm. Jeanne Baudin and I were, so far as I ever knew, good friends, but one is never sure, and when you folded up her statement in a hurry I was naturally very anxious to hear the rest of it."

"Yes, I agree," Jim intervened. "It did look as if the nurse might have added something malevolent, which could neither be proved nor disproved."

"It was a misunderstanding, Mademoiselle," Hanaud replied in a voice of apology. "We will take care that there shall not be any other." He looked over the nurse's statement again.

"It is said here that you saw that Madame had her favourite books and her drink beside the bed. That is true."

"Yes, Monsieur."

"What was that drink?"

"A glass of lemonade."

"It was placed on a table, I suppose, ready for her every night?"

"Every night."

"And there was no narcotic dissolved in it?"

"None," Betty replied. "If Mrs. Harlowe was restless, the nurse would give an opium pill and very occasionally a slight injection of morphia."

"But that was not done on this night?"

"Not to my knowledge. If it was done, it was done after my departure."

"Very well," said Hanaud, and he folded the paper and put it away in his pocket. "That is finished with. We have you now out of the house at five minutes to nine in the evening, and Madame in her bed with her health no worse than usual."

"Yes."

"Good!" Hanaud changed his attitude. "Now let us go over your evening, Mademoiselle! I take it that you stayed at the house of M. de Pouillac until you returned home."

"Yes."

"You remember with whom you danced? If it was necessary, could you give me a list of your partners?"

She rose and, crossing to the writing table, sat down in front of it. She drew a sheet of paper towards her and took up a pencil. Pausing now and again to jog her memory with the blunt end of the pencil at her lips, she wrote down a list of names.

"These are all, I think," she said, handing the list to Hanaud. He put it in his pocket.

"Thank you!" He was all contentment now. Although his questions followed without hesitation, one upon the other, it seemed to Jim that he was receiving just the answers which he expected. He had the air of a man engaged upon an inevitable formality and anxious to get it completely accomplished, rather than of one pressing keenly a strict investigation.

"Now, Mademoiselle, at what hour did you arrive home?"

"At twenty minutes past one."

"You are sure of that exact time? You looked at your watch? Or at the clock in the hall? Or what? How are you sure that you reached the Maison Crenelle exactly at twenty minutes past one?"

Hanaud hitched his chair a little more forward, but he had not to wait a second for the answer.

"There is no clock in the hall and I had no watch with me," Betty replied. "I don't like those wrist-watches which some girls wear. I hate things round my wrists," and she shook her arm impatiently, as though she imagined the constriction of a bracelet. "And I did not put my watch in my hand-bag because I am so liable to leave that behind. So I had nothing to tell me the time when I reached home. I was not sure that I had not kept Georges—the chauffeur—out a little later than he cared for. So I made him my excuse, explaining that I didn't really know how late I was."

"I see. It was Georges who told you the time at the actual moment of your arrival?"

"Yes."

"And Georges is no doubt the chauffeur whom I saw at work as I crossed the courtyard?"

"Yes. He told me that he was glad to see me have a little gaiety, and he took out his watch and showed it to me with a laugh."

"This happened at the front door, or at those big iron gates, Mademoiselle?" Hanaud asked.

"At the front door. There is no lodge-keeper and the gates are left open when any one is out."

"And how did you get into the house?"

"I used my latch-key."

"Good! All this is very clear."

Betty, however, was not mollified by Hanaud's satisfaction with her replies. Although she answered him without delay, her answers were given mutinously. Jim began to be a little troubled. She should have met Hanaud half-way; she was imprudently petulant.

"She'll make an enemy of this man before she has done," he reflected uneasily. But he glanced at the detective and was relieved. For Hanaud was watching her with a smile which would have disarmed any less offended young lady—a smile half friendliness and half amusement. Jim took a turn upon himself.

"After all," he argued, "this very imprudence pleads for her better than any calculation. The guilty don't behave like that." And he waited for the next stage in the examination with an easy mind.

"Now we have got you back home and within the Maison Crenelle before half past one in the morning," resumed Hanaud. "What did you do then?"

"I went straight upstairs to my bedroom," said Betty.

"Was your maid waiting up for you, Mademoiselle?"

"No; I had told her that I should be late and that I could undress myself."

"You are considerate, Mademoiselle. No wonder that your servants were pleased that you should have a little gaiety."

Even that advance did not appease the offended girl.

"Yes?" she asked with a sort of silky sweetness which was more hostile than any acid rejoinder. But it did not stir Hanaud to any resentment.

"When, then, did you first hear of Madame Harlowe's death?" was asked.

"The next morning my maid Francine came running into my room at seven o'clock. The nurse Jeanne had just discovered it. I slipped on my dressing-gown and ran downstairs. As soon as I saw that it was true, I rang up the two doctors who were in the habit of attending here."

"Did you notice the glass of lemonade?"

"Yes. It was empty."

"Your maid is still with you?"

"Yes—Francine Rollard. She is at your disposal."

Hanaud shrugged his shoulders and smiled doubtfully.

"That, if it is necessary at all, can come later. We have the story of your movements now from you, Mademoiselle, and that is what is important."

He rose from his chair.

"I have been, I am afraid, a very troublesome person, Mademoiselle Harlowe," he said with a bow. "But it is very necessary for your own sake that no obscurities should be left for the world's suspicions to play with. And we are very close to the end of this ordeal."

Jim had nursed a hope the moment Hanaud rose that this wearing interview had already ended. Betty, for her part, was indifferent.

"That is for you to say, Monsieur," she said implacably.

"Just two points then, and I think, upon reflection, you will understand that I have asked you no question which is unfair."

Betty bowed.

"Your two points, Monsieur."

"First, then. You inherit, I believe, the whole fortune of Madame?"

"Yes."

"Did you expect to inherit it all? Did you know of her will?"

"No. I expected that a good deal of the money would be left to Monsieur Boris. But I don't remember that she ever told me so. I expected it, because Monsieur Boris so continually repeated that it was so."

"No doubt," said Hanaud lightly. "As to yourself, was Madame generous to you during her life."

The hard look disappeared from Betty's face. It softened to sorrow and regret.

"Very," she answered in a low voice. "I had one thousand pounds a year as a regular allowance, and a thousand pounds goes a long way in Dijon. Besides, if I wanted more, I had only to ask for it."

Betty's voice broke in a sob suddenly and Hanaud turned away with a delicacy for which Jim was not prepared. He began to look at the books upon the shelves, that she might have time to control her sorrow, taking down one here, one there, and speaking of them in a casual tone.

"It is easy to see that this was the library of Monsieur Simon Harlowe," he said, and was suddenly brought to a stop. For the door was thrown open and a girl broke into the room.

"Betty," she began, and stood staring from one to another of Betty's visitors.

"Ann, this is Monsieur Hanaud," said Betty with a careless wave of her hand, and Ann went white as a sheet.

Ann! Then this girl was Ann Upcott, thought Jim Frobisher, the girl who had written to him, the girl, all acquaintanceship with whom he had twice denied, and he had sat side by side with her, he had even spoken to her. She swept across the room to him.

"So you have come!" she cried. "But I knew that you would!"

Jim was conscious of a mist of shining yellow hair, a pair of sapphire eyes, and of a face impertinently lovely and most delicate in its colour.

"Of course I have come," he said feebly, and Hanaud looked on with a smile. He had an eye on Betty Harlowe, and the smile said as clearly as words could say, "That young man is going to have a deal of trouble before he gets out of Dijon."

CHAPTER SIX: Jim Changes His Lodging

The library was a big oblong room with two tall windows looking into the court, and the observation window thrown out at the end over the footway of the street. A door in the inner wall close to this window led to a room behind, and a big open fire-place faced the windows on the court. For the rest, the walls were lined with high book-shelves filled with books, except for a vacant space here and there where a volume had been removed. Hanaud put back in its place the book which he had been holding in his hand.

"One can easily see that this is the library of Simon Harlowe, the collector," he said. "I have always thought that if one only had the time to study and compare the books which a man buys and reads, one would more surely get the truth of him than in any other way. But alas! one never has the time." He turned towards Jim Frobisher regretfully. "Come and stand with me, Monsieur Frobisher. For even a glance at the backs of them tells one something."

Jim took his place by Hanaud's side.

"Look, here is a book on Old English Gold Plate, and another—pronounce that title for me, if you please."

Jim read the title of the book on which Hanaud's finger was placed.

"Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain."

Hanaud repeated the inscription and moved along. From a shelf at the level of his breast and just to the left of the window in which Betty was sitting, he took a large, thinnish volume in a paper cover, and turned over the plates. It was a brochure upon Battersea Enamel.

"There should be a second volume," said Jim Frobisher with a glance at the bookshelf. It was the idlest of remarks. He was not paying any attention to the paper-covered book upon Battersea Enamel. For he was really engaged in speculating why Hanaud had called him to his side. Was it on the chance that he might detect some swift look of understanding as it was exchanged by the two girls, some sign that they were in a collusion? If so, he was to be disappointed. For though Betty and Ann were now free from Hanaud's vigilant eye, neither of them moved, neither of them signalled to the other. Hanaud, however, seemed entirely interested in his book. He answered Jim's suggestion.

"Yes, one would suppose that there were a second volume. But this is complete," he said, and he put back the book in its place. There was room next to it for another quarto book, so long as it was no thicker, and Hanaud rested his finger in the vacant place on the shelf, with his thoughts clearly far away.

Betty recalled him to his surroundings.

"Monsieur Hanaud," she said in her quiet voice from her seat in the window, "there was a second point, you said, on which you would like to ask me a question."

"Yes, Mademoiselle, I had not forgotten it."

He turned with a curiously swift movement and stood so that he had both girls in front of him, Betty on his left in the window, Ann Upcott standing a little apart upon his right, gazing at him with a look of awe.

"Have you, Mademoiselle," he asked, "been pestered, since Boris Waberski brought his accusation, with any of these anonymous letters which seem to be flying about Dijon?"

"I have received one," answered Betty, and Ann Upcott raised her eyebrows in surprise. "It came on Sunday morning. It was very slanderous, of course, and I should have taken no notice of it but for one thing. It told me that you, Monsieur Hanaud, were coming from Paris to take up the case."

"Oho!" said Hanaud softly. "And you received this letter on the Sunday morning? Can you show it to me, Mademoiselle?"

Betty shook her head.

"No, Monsieur."

Hanaud smiled.

"Of course not. You destroyed it, as such letter should be destroyed."

"No, I didn't," Betty answered. "I kept it. I put it away in a drawer of my writing-table in my own sitting-room. But that room is sealed up, Monsieur Hanaud. The letter is in the drawer still."

Hanaud received the statement with a frank satisfaction.

"It cannot run away, then, Mademoiselle," he said contentedly. But the contentment passed. "So the Commissaire of Police actually sealed up your private sitting-room. That, to be sure, was going a little far."

Betty shrugged her shoulders.

"It was mine, you see, where I keep my private things. And after all I was accused!" she said bitterly; but Ann Upcott was not satisfied to leave the matter there. She drew a step nearer to Betty and then looked at Hanaud.

"But that is not all the truth," she said. "Betty's room belongs to that suite of rooms in which Madame Harlowe's bedroom was arranged. It is the last room of the suite opening on to the hall, and for that reason, as the Commissaire said with an apology, it was necessary to seal it up with the others."

"I thank you, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud with a smile. "Yes, that of course softens his action." He looked whimsically at Betty in the window-seat. "It has been my misfortune, I am afraid, to offend Mademoiselle Harlowe. Will you help me to get all these troublesome dates now clear? Madame Harlowe was buried, I understand, on the Saturday morning twelve days ago!"

"Yes, Monsieur," said Ann Upcott.

"And after the funeral, on your return to this house, the notary opened and read the will?"

"Yes, Monsieur."

"And in Boris Waberski's presence?"

"Yes."

"Then exactly a week later, on Saturday, the seventh of May, he goes off quickly to the Prefecture of Police?"

"Yes."

"And on Sunday morning by the post comes the anonymous letter?"

Hanaud turned away to Betty, who bowed her head in answer.

"And a little later on the same morning comes the Commissaire, who seals the doors."

"At eleven o'clock, to be exact," replied Ann Upcott.

Hanaud bowed low.

"You are both wonderful young ladies. You notice the precise hour at which things happen. It is a rare gift, and very useful to people like myself."

Ann Upcott had been growing easier and easier in her manner with each answer that she gave. Now she could laugh outright.

"I do, at all events, Monsieur Hanaud," she said. "But alas! I was born to be an old maid. A chair out of place, a book disarranged, a clock not keeping time, or even a pin on the carpet—I cannot bear these things. I notice them at once and I must put them straight. Yes, it was precisely eleven o'clock when the Commissaire of Police rang the bell."

"Did he search the rooms before he sealed them?" Hanaud asked.

"No. We both of us thought his negligence strange," Ann replied, "until he informed us that the Examining Magistrate wanted everything left just as it was."

Hanaud laughed genially.

"That was on my account," he explained. "Who could tell what wonderful things Hanaud might not discover with his magnifying glass when he arrived from Paris? What fatal fingerprints! Oh! Ho! ho! What scraps of burnt letter! Ah! Ha! ha! But I tell you, Mademoiselle, that if a crime has been committed in this house, even Hanaud would not expect to make any startling discoveries in rooms which had been open to the whole household for a fortnight since the crime. However," and he moved towards the door, "since I am here now——"

Betty was upon her feet like a flash of lightning. Hanaud stopped and swung round upon her, swiftly, with his eyes very challenging and hard.

"You are going to break those seals now?" she asked with a curious breathlessness. "Then may I come with you—please, please! It is I who am accused. I have a right to be present," and her voice rose into an earnest cry.

"Calm yourself, Mademoiselle," Hanaud returned gently. "No advantage will be taken of you. I am going to break no seals. That, as I have told you, is the right of the Commissaire, who is a magistrate, and he will not move until the medical analysis is ready. No, what I was going to propose was that Mademoiselle here," and he pointed to Ann, "should show me the outside of those reception-rooms and the rest of the house."

"Of course," said Betty, and she sat down again in the window-seat.

"Thank you," said Hanaud. He turned back to Ann Upcott. "Shall we go? And as we go, will you tell me what you think of Boris Waberski?"

"He has some nerve. I can tell you that, Monsieur Hanaud," Ann cried. "He actually came back to this house after he had lodged his charge, and asked me to support him"; and she passed out of the room in front of Hanaud.

Jim Frobisher followed the couple to the door and closed it behind them. The last few minutes had set his mind altogether at rest. The author of the anonymous letters was the detective's real quarry. His manner had quite changed when putting his questions about them. The flamboyancies and the indifference, even his amusement at Betty's ill-humour had quite disappeared. He had got to business watchfully, quietly. Jim came back into the room. He took his cigarette-case from his pocket and opened it.

"May I smoke?" he asked. As he turned to Betty for permission, a fresh shock brought his thoughts and words alike to a standstill. She was staring at him with panic naked in her eyes and her face set like a tragic mask.

"He believes me guilty," she whispered.

"No," said Jim, and he went to her side. But she would not listen.

"He does. I am sure of it. Don't you see that he was bound to? He was sent from Paris. He has his reputation to think of. He must have his victim before he returns."

Jim was sorely tempted to break his word. He had only to tell the real cause which had fetched Hanaud out of Paris and Betty's distress was gone. But he could not. Every tradition of his life strove to keep him silent. He dared not even tell her that this charge against her was only an excuse. She must live in anxiety for a little while longer. He laid his hand gently upon her shoulder.

"Betty, don't believe that!" he said, with a consciousness of how weak that phrase was compared with the statement he could have made. "I was watching Hanaud, listening to him. I am sure that he already knew the answers to the questions he was asking you. Why, he even knew that Simon Harlowe had a passion for collecting, though not a word had been said of it. He was asking questions to see how you would answer them, setting now and then a little trap, as he admitted——"

"Yes," said Betty in trembling voice, "all the time he was setting traps."

"And every answer that you gave, even your manner in giving them," Jim continued stoutly, "more and more made clear your innocence."

"To him?" asked Betty.

"Yes, to him. I am sure of it."

Betty Harlowe caught at his arm and held it in both her hands. She leaned her head against it. Through the sleeve of his coat he felt the velvet of her cheek.

"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you, Jim," and as she pronounced the name she smiled. She was thanking him not so much for the stout confidence of his words, as for the comfort which the touch of him gave to her.

"Very likely I am making too much of little things," she went on. "Very likely I am ungenerous, too, to Monsieur Hanaud. But he lives amidst crimes and criminals. He must be so used to seeing people condemned and passing out of sight into blackness and horrors, that one more or less, whether innocent or guilty, going that way, wouldn't seem to matter very much."

"Yes, Betty, I think that is a little unjust," Jim Frobisher remarked gently.

"Very well, I take it back," she said, and she let his arm go. "All the same, Jim, I am looking to you, not to him," and she laughed with an appealing tremor in the laugh which took his heart by storm.

"Luckily," said he, "you don't have to look to any one," and he had hardly finished the sentence before Ann Upcott came back alone into the room. She was about Betty's height and Betty's age and had the same sort of boyish slenderness and carriage which marks the girls of this generation. But in other respects, even to the colour of her clothes, she was as dissimilar as one girl can be from another. She was dressed in white from her coat to her shoes, and she wore a big gold hat so that one was almost at a loss to know where her hat ended and her hair began.

"And Monsieur Hanaud?" Betty asked.

"He is prowling about by himself," she replied. "I showed him all the rooms and who used them, and he said that he would have a look at them and sent me back to you."

"Did he break the seals on the reception-rooms?" Betty Harlowe asked.

"Oh, no," said Ann. "Why, he told us that he couldn't do that without the Commissaire."

"Yes, he told us that," Betty remarked dryly. "But I was wondering whether he meant what he told us."

"Oh, I don't think Monsieur Hanaud's alarming," said Ann. She gave Jim Frobisher the impression that at any moment she might call him a dear old thing. She had quite got over the first little shock which the announcement of his presence had caused her. "Besides," and she sat down by the side of Betty in the window-seat and looked with the frankest confidence at Jim—"besides, we can feel safe now, anyway."

Jim Frobisher threw up his hands in despair. That queer look of aloofness had played him false with Ann Upcott now, as it had already done with Betty. If these two girls had called on him for help when a sudden squall found them in an open sailing-boat with the sheet of the sail made fast, or on the ice-slope of a mountain, or with a rhinoceros lumbering towards them out of some forest of the Nile, he would not have shrunk from their trust. But this was quite a different matter. They were calmly pitting him against Hanaud.

"You were safe before," he exclaimed. "Hanaud is not your enemy, and as for me, I have neither experience nor natural gifts for this sort of work"—and he broke off with a groan. For both the girls were watching him with a smile of complete disbelief.

"Good heavens, they think that I am being astute," he reflected, "and the more I confess my incapacity the astuter they'll take me to be." He gave up all arguments. "Of course I am absolutely at your service," he said.

"Thank you," said Betty. "You will bring your luggage from your hotel and stay here, won't you?"

Jim was tempted to accept that invitation. But, on the one hand, he might wish to see Hanaud at the Grande Taverne; or Hanaud might wish to see him, and secrecy was to be the condition of such meetings. It was better that he should keep his freedom of movement complete.

"I won't put you to so much trouble, Betty," he replied. "There's no reason in the world that I should. A call over the telephone and in five minutes I am at your side."

Betty Harlowe seemed in doubt to press her invitation or not.

"It looks a little inhospitable in me," she began, and the door opened, and Hanaud entered the room.

"I left my hat and stick here," he said. He picked them up and bowed to the girls.

"You have seen everything, Monsieur Hanaud?" Betty asked.

"Everything, Mademoiselle. I shall not trouble you again until the report of the analysis is in my hands. I wish you a good morning."

Betty slipped off the window-seat and accompanied him out into the hall. It appeared to Jim Frobisher that she was seeking to make some amends for her ill-humour; and when he heard her voice he thought to detect in it some note of apology.

"I shall be very glad if you will let me know the sense of that report as soon as possible," she pleaded. "You, better than any one, will understand that this is a difficult hour for me."

"I understand very well, Mademoiselle," Hanaud answered gravely. "I will see to it that the hour is not prolonged."

Jim, watching them through the doorway, as they stood together in the sunlit hall, felt ever so slight a touch upon his arm. He wheeled about quickly. Ann Upcott was at his side with all the liveliness and even the delicate colour gone from her face, and a wild and desperate appeal in her eyes.

"You will come and stay here? Oh, please!" she whispered.

"I have just refused," he answered. "You heard me."

"I know," she went on, the words stumbling over one another from her lips. "But take back your refusal. Do! Oh, I am frightened out of my wits. I don't understand anything. I am terrified!" And she clasped her hands together in supplication. Jim had never seen fear so stark, no, not even in Betty's eyes a few minutes ago. It robbed her exquisite face of all its beauty, and made it in a second, haggard and old. But before he could answer, a stick clattered loudly upon the pavement of the hall and startled them both like the crack of a pistol.

Jim looked through the doorway. Hanaud was stooping to pick up his cane. Betty made a dive for it, but Hanaud already had it in his hands.

"I thank you, Mademoiselle, but I can still touch my toes. Every morning I do it five times in my pyjamas," and with a laugh he ran down the couple of steps into the courtyard and with that curiously quick saunter of his was out into the street of Charles-Robert in a moment. When Jim turned again to Ann Upcott, the fear had gone from her face so completely that he could hardly believe his eyes.

"Betty, he is going to stay," she cried gaily.

"So I inferred," replied Betty with a curious smile as she came back into the room.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Exit Waberski

Jim Frobisher neither saw nor heard any more of Hanaud that day. He fetched his luggage away from the hotel and spent the evening with Betty Harlowe and Ann Upcott at the Maison Crenelle. They took their coffee after dinner in the garden behind the house, descending to it by a short flight of stone steps from a great door at the back of the hall. And by some sort of unspoken compact they avoided all mention of Waberski's charge. They had nothing to do but to wait now for the analyst's report. But the long line of high, shuttered windows just above their heads, the windows of the reception-rooms, forbade them to forget the subject, and their conversation perpetually dwindled down into long silences. It was cool out here in the dark garden, cool and very still; so that the bustle of a bird amongst the leaves of the sycamores startled them and the rare footsteps of a passer-by in the little street of Charles-Robert rang out as though they would wake a dreaming city. Jim noticed that once or twice Ann Upcott leaned swiftly forward and stared across the dark lawns and glimmering paths to the great screen of tall trees, as if her eyes had detected a movement amongst their stems. But on each occasion she said nothing and with an almost inaudible sigh sank back in her chair.

"Is there a door into the garden from the street?" Frobisher asked, and Betty answered him.

"No. There is a passage at the end of the house under the reception-rooms from the courtyard which the gardeners use. The only other entrance is through the hall behind us. This old house was built in days when your house really was your castle and the fewer the entrances, the more safely you slept."

The clocks of that city of Clocks clashed out the hour of eleven, throwing the sounds of their strokes backwards and forwards above the pinnacles and roof-tops in a sort of rivalry. Betty rose to her feet.

"There's a day gone, at all events," she said, and Ann Upcott agreed with a breath of relief. To Jim it seemed a pitiful thing that these two girls, to whom each day should be a succession of sparkling hours all too short, must be rejoicing quietly, almost gratefully, that another of them had passed.

"It should be the last of the bad days," he said, and Betty turned swiftly towards him, her great eyes shining in the darkness.

"Good night, Jim," she said, her voice ever so slightly lingering like a caress upon his name and she held out her hand. "It's terribly dull for you, but we are not unselfish enough to let you go. You see, we are shunned just now—oh, it's natural! To have you with us means a great deal. For one thing," and there came a little lilt in her voice, "I shall sleep to-night." She ran up the steps and stood for a moment against the light from the hall. "A long-legged slip of a girl, in black silk stockings"—thus Mr. Haslitt had spoken of her as she was five years ago, and the description fitted her still.

"Good night, Betty," said Jim, and Ann Upcott ran past him up the steps and waved her hand.

"Good night," said Jim, and with a little twist of her shoulders Ann followed Betty. She came back, however. She was wearing a little white frock of crêpe de Chine with white stockings and satin shoes, and she gleamed at the head of the steps like a slender thing of silver.

"You'll bolt the door when you come in, won't you?" She pleaded with a curious anxiety considering the height of the strong walls about the garden.

"I will," said Jim, and he wondered why in all this business Ann Upcott stood out as a note of fear. It was high time indeed, that the long line of windows was thrown open and the interdict raised from the house and its inmates. Jim Frobisher paced the quiet garden in the darkness with a prayer at his heart that that time would come to-morrow. In Betty's room above the reception-rooms the light was still burning behind the latticed shutters of the windows, in spite of her confidence that she would sleep—yes, and in Ann Upcott's room too, at the end of the house towards the street. A fury against Boris Waberski flamed up in him.

It was late before he himself went into the house and barred the door, later still before he fell asleep. But once asleep, he slept soundly, and when he waked, it was to find his shutters thrown wide to the sunlight, his coffee cold by his bedside, and Gaston, the old servant, in the room.

"Monsieur Hanaud asked me to tell you he was in the library," he said.

Jim was out of bed in an instant.

"Already? What is the time, Gaston?"

"Nine o'clock. I have prepared Monsieur's bath." He removed the tray from the table by the bed. "I will bring some fresh coffee."

"Thank you! And will you please tell Monsieur Hanaud that I will not be long."

"Certainly, Monsieur."

Jim took his coffee while he dressed and hurried down to the library, where he found Hanaud seated at the big writing-table in the middle of the room, with a newspaper spread out over the blotting-pad and placidly reading the news. He spoke quickly enough, however, the moment Jim appeared.

"So you left your hotel in the Place Darcy, after all, eh, my friend? The exquisite Miss Upcott! She had but to sigh out a little prayer and clasp her hands together, and it was done. Yes, I saw it all from the hall. What it is to be young! You have those two letters which Waberski wrote your firm?"

"Yes," said Jim. He did not think it necessary to explain that though the prayer was Ann Upcott's, it was the thought of Betty which had brought him to the Maison Grenelle.

"Good! I have sent for him," said Hanaud.

"To come to this house?"

"I am expecting him now."

"That's capital," cried Jim. "I shall meet him, then! The damned rogue! I shouldn't wonder if I thumped him," and he clenched his fist and shook it in a joyous anticipation.

"I doubt if that would be so helpful as you think. No, I beg of you to place yourself in my hands this morning, Monsieur Frobisher," Hanaud interposed soberly. "If you confront Waberski at once with those two letters, at once his accusation breaks down. He will withdraw it. He will excuse himself. He will burst into a torrent of complaints and reproaches. And I shall get nothing out of him. That I do not want."

"But what is there to be got?" Jim asked impatiently.

"Something perhaps. Perhaps nothing," the detective returned with a shrug of the shoulders. "I have a second mission in Dijon, as I told you in Paris."

"The anonymous letters?"

"Yes. You were present yesterday when Mademoiselle Harlowe told me how she learned that I was summoned from Paris upon this case. It was not, after all, any of my colleagues here who spread the news. It is even now unknown that I am here. No, it was the writer of the letters. And in so difficult a matter I can afford to neglect no clue. Did Waberski know that I was going to be sent for? Did he hear that at the Prefecture when he lodged his charge on the Saturday or from the examining magistrate on the same day? And if he did, to whom did he talk between the time when he saw the magistrate and the time when letters must be posted if they are to be delivered on the Sunday morning? These are questions I must have the answer to, and if we at once administer the knock-out with your letters, I shall not get them. I must lead him on with friendliness. You see that."

Jim very reluctantly did. He had longed to see Hanaud dealing with Waberski in the most outrageous of his moods, pouncing and tearing and trampling with the gibes of a schoolboy and the improprieties of the gutter. Hanaud indeed had promised him as much. But he found him now all for restraint and sobriety and more concerned apparently with the authorship of the anonymous letters than with the righting of Betty Harlowe. Jim felt that he had been defrauded.

"But I am to meet this man," he said. "That must not be forgotten."

"And it shall not be," Hanaud assured him. He led him over to the door in the inner wall close to the observation window and opened it.

"See! If you will please to wait in here," and as the disappointment deepened on Jim's face, he added, "Oh, I do not ask you to shut the door. No. Bring up a chair to it—so! And keep the door ajar so! Then you will see and hear and yet not be seen. You are content? Not very. You would prefer to be on the stage the whole time like an actor. Yes, we all do. But, at all events, you do not throw up your part," and with a friendly grin he turned back to the table.

A shuffling step which merged into the next step with a curiously slovenly sound rose from the courtyard.

"It was time we made our little arrangements," said Hanaud in an undertone. "For here comes our hero from the Steppes."

Jim popped his head through the doorway.

"Monsieur Hanaud!" he whispered excitedly. "Monsieur Hanaud! It cannot be wise to leave those windows open on the courtyard. For if we can hear a footstep so loudly in this room, anything said in this room will be easily overheard in the court."

"But how true that is!" Hanaud replied in the same voice and struck his forehead with his fist in anger at his folly. "But what are we to do? The day is so hot. This room will be an oven. The ladies and Waberski will all faint. Besides, I have an officer in plain clothes already stationed in the court to see that it is kept empty. Yes, we will risk it."

Jim drew back.

"That man doesn't welcome advice from any one," he said indignantly, but he said it only to himself; and almost before he had finished, the bell rang. A few seconds afterwards Gaston entered.

"Monsieur Boris," he said.

"Yes," said Hanaud with a nod. "And will you tell the ladies that we are ready?"

Boris Waberski, a long, round-shouldered man with bent knees and clumsy feet, dressed in black and holding a soft black felt hat in his hand, shambled quickly into the room and stopped dead at the sight of Hanaud. Hanaud bowed and Waberski returned the bow; and then the two men stood looking at one another—Hanaud all geniality and smiles, Waberski a rather grotesque figure of uneasiness like one of those many grim caricatures carved by the imagination of the Middle Ages on the columns of the churches of Dijon. He blinked in perplexity at the detective and with his long, tobacco-stained fingers tortured his grey moustache.

"Will you be seated?" said Hanaud politely. "I think that the ladies will not keep us waiting."

He pointed towards a chair in front of the writing-table but on his left hand and opposite to the door.

"I don't understand," said Waberski doubtfully. "I received a message. I understood that the Examining Magistrate had sent for me."

"I am his agent," said Hanaud. "I am——" and he stopped. "Yes?"

Boris Waberski stared.

"I said nothing."

"I beg your pardon. I am—Hanaud."

He shot the name out quickly, but he was answered by no start, nor by any sign of recognition.

"Hanaud?" Waberski shook his head. "That no doubt should be sufficient to enlighten me," he said with a smile, "but it is better to be frank—it doesn't."

"Hanaud of the Sûrété of Paris."

And upon Waberski's face there came slowly a look of utter consternation.

"Oh!" he said, and again "Oh!" with a lamentable look towards the door as if he was in two minds whether to make a bolt of it. Hanaud pointed again to the chair, and Waberski murmured, "Yes—to be sure," and made a little run to it and sank down.

Jim Frobisher, watching from his secret place, was certain of one thing. Boris Waberski had not written the anonymous letter to Betty nor had he contributed the information about Hanaud to the writer. He might well have been thought to have been acting ignorance of Hanaud's name, up to the moment when Hanaud explained who Hanaud was. But no longer. His consternation then was too genuine.

"You will understand, of course, that an accusation so serious as the one you have brought against Mademoiselle Harlowe demands the closest inquiry," Hanaud continued without any trace of irony, "and the Examining Magistrate in charge of the case honoured us in Paris with a request for help."

"Yes, it is very difficult," replied Boris Waberski, twisting about as if he was a martyr on red-hot plates.

But the difficulty was Waberski's, as Jim, with that distressed man in full view, was now able to appreciate. Waberski had rushed to the Prefecture when no answer came from Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt to his letter of threats, and had brought his charge in a spirit of disappointment and rancour, with a hope no doubt that some offer of cash would be made to him and that he could withdraw it. Now he found the trained detective service of France upon his heels, asking for his proofs and evidence. This was more than he had bargained for.

"I thought," Hanaud continued easily, "that a little informal conversation between you and me and the two young ladies, without shorthand writers or secretaries, might be helpful."

"Yes, indeed," said Waberski hopefully.

"As a preliminary of course," Hanaud added dryly, "a preliminary to the more serious and now inevitable procedure."

Waberski's gleam of hopefulness was extinguished.

"To be sure," he murmured, plucking at his lean throat nervously. "Cases must proceed."

"That is what they are there for," said Hanaud sententiously; and the door of the library was pushed open. Betty came into the room with Ann Upcott immediately behind her.

"You sent for me," she began to Hanaud, and then she saw Boris Waberski. Her little head went up with a jerk, her eyes smouldered. "Monsieur Boris," she said, and again she spoke to Hanaud. "Come to take possession, I suppose?" Then she looked round the room for Jim Frobisher, and exclaimed in a sudden dismay:

"But I understood that——" and Hanaud was just in time to stop her from mentioning any name.

"All in good time, Mademoiselle," he said quickly. "Let us take things in their order."

Betty took her old place in the window-seat. Ann Upcott shut the door and sat down in a chair a little apart from the others. Hanaud folded up his newspaper and laid it aside. On the big blotting-pad which was now revealed lay one of those green files which Jim Frobisher had noticed in the office of the Sûrété. Hanaud opened it and took up the top paper. He turned briskly to Waberski.

"Monsieur, you state that on the night of the 27th of April, this girl here, Betty Harlowe, did wilfully give to her adoptive mother and benefactress, Jeanne-Marie Harlowe, an overdose of a narcotic by which her death was brought about."

"Yes," said Waberski with an air of boldness, "I declare that."

"You do not specify the narcotic?"

"It was probably morphine, but I cannot be sure."

"And administered, according to you, if this summary which I hold here is correct, in the glass of lemonade which Madame Harlowe had always at her bedside."

"Yes."

Hanaud laid the sheet of foolscap down again.

"You do not charge the nurse, Jeanne Baudin, with complicity in this crime?" he asked.

"Oh, no!" Waberski exclaimed with a sort of horror, with his eyes open wide and his eyebrows running up his forehead towards his hedge of wiry hair. "I have not a suspicion of Jeanne Baudin. I pray you, Monsieur Hanaud, to be clear upon that point. There must be no injustice! No! Oh, it is well that I came here to-day! Jeanne Baudin! Listen! I would engage her to nurse me to-morrow, were my health to fail."

"One cannot say more than that," replied Hanaud with a grave sympathy. "I only asked you the question because undoubtedly Jeanne Baudin was in Madame's bedroom when Mademoiselle entered it to wish Madame good night and show off her new dancing-frock."

"Yes, I understand," said Waberski. He was growing more and more confident, so suave and friendly was this Monsieur Hanaud of the Sûrété. "But the fatal drug was slipped into that glass without a doubt when Jeanne Baudin was not looking. I do not accuse her. No! It is that hard one," and his voice began to shake and his mouth to work, "who slipped it in and then hurried off to dance till morning, whilst her victim died. It is terrible that! Yes, Monsieur Hanaud, it is terrible. My poor sister!"

"Sister-in-law."

The correction came with an acid calm from an armchair near the door in which Ann Upcott was reclining.

"Sister to me!" replied Waberski mournfully and he turned to Hanaud. "Monsieur, I shall never cease to reproach myself. I was away fishing in the forest. If I had stayed at home! Think of it! I ask you to——" and his voice broke.

"Yes, but you did come back, Monsieur Waberski," Hanaud said, "and this is where I am perplexed. You loved your sister. That is clear, since you cannot even think of her without tears."

"Yes, yes," Waberski shaded his eyes with his hand.

"Then why did you, loving her so dearly, wait for so long before you took any action to avenge her death? There will be some good reason not a doubt, but I have not got it." Hanaud continued, spreading out his hands. "Listen to the dates. Your dear sister dies on the night of the 27th of April. You return home on the 28th; and you do nothing, you bring no charge, you sit all quiet. She is buried on the 30th, and after that you still do nothing, you sit all quiet. It is not until one week after that you launch your accusation against Mademoiselle. Why? I beg you, Monsieur Waberski, not to look at me between the fingers, for the answer is not written on my face, and to explain this difficulty to me."

The request was made in the same pleasant, friendly voice which Hanaud had used so far and without any change of intonation. But Waberski snatched his hand away from his forehead and sat up with a flush on his face.

"I answer you at once," he exclaimed. "From the first I knew it here," and he thumped his heart with his fist, "that murder had been committed. But as yet I did not know it here," and he patted his forehead, "in my head. So I think and I think and I think. I see reasons and motives. They build themselves up. A young girl of beauty and style, but of a strange and secret character, thirsting in her heart for colour and laughter and enjoyment and the power which her beauty offers her if she will but grasp it, and yet while thirsting, very able to conceal all sign of thirst. That is the picture I give you of that hard one, Betty Harlowe."

For the first time since the interview had commenced, Betty herself showed some interest in it. Up till now she had sat without a movement, a figure of disdain in an ice-house of pride. Now she flashed into life. She leaned forward, her elbow on her crossed knee, her chin propped in her hand, her eyes on Waberski, and a smile of amusement at this analysis of herself giving life to her face. Jim Frobisher, on the other hand, behind his door felt that he was listening to blasphemies. Why did Hanaud endure it? There was information, he had said, which he wanted to get from Boris Waberski. The point on which he wanted information was settled long ago, at the very beginning of this informal session. It was as clear as daylight that Waberski had nothing to do with Betty's anonymous letter. Why, then, should Hanaud give this mountebank of a fellow a free opportunity to slander Betty Harlowe? Why should he question and question as if there were solid weight in the accusation? Why, in a word, didn't he fling open this door, allow Frobisher to produce the blackmailing letters to Mr. Haslitt, and then stand aside while Boris Waberski was put into that condition in which he would call upon the services of Jeanne Baudin? Jim indeed was furiously annoyed with Monsieur Hanaud. He explained to himself that he was disappointed.

Meanwhile, Boris Waberski, after a little nervous check when Betty had leaned forward, continued his description.

"For such a one Dijon would be tiresome. It is true there was each year a month or so at Monte Carlo, just enough to give one a hint of what might be, like a cigarette to a man who wants to smoke. And then back to Dijon! Ah, Monsieur, not the Dijon of the Dukes of Burgundy, not even the Dijon of the Parliament of the States, but the Dijon of to-day, an ordinary, dull, provincial town of France which keeps nothing of its former gaieties and glory but some old rare buildings and a little spirit of mockery. Imagine, then, Monsieur, this hard one with a fortune and freedom within her grasp if only she has the boldness on some night when Monsieur Boris is out of the way to seize them! Nor is that all. For there is an invalid in the house to whom attentions are owed—yes, and must be given." Waberski, in a flight of excitement checked himself and half closed his eyes, with a little cunning nod. "For the invalid was not so easy. No, even that dear one had her failings. Oh, yes, and we will not forget them when the moment comes for the extenuating pleas. No, indeed," and he flung his arm out nobly. "I myself will be the first to urge them to the judge of the Assizes when the verdict is given."

Betty Harlowe leaned back once more indifferent. From an arm-chair near the door, a little gurgle of laughter broke from the lips of Ann Upcott. Even Hanaud smiled.

"Yes, yes," he said; "but we have not got quite as far as the Court of Assizes, Monsieur Waberski. We are still at the point where you know it in your heart but not in your head."

"That is so," Waberski returned briskly. "On the seventh of May, a Saturday, I bring my accusation to the Prefecture. Why? For, on the morning of that day I am certain. I know it at last here too," and up went his hand to his forehead, and he hitched himself forward on to the edge of his chair.

"I am in the street of Gambetta, one of the small popular new streets, a street with some little shops and a reputation not of the best. At ten o'clock I am passing quickly through that street when from a little shop a few yards in front of me out pops that hard one, my niece."

Suddenly the whole character of that session had changed. Jim Frobisher, though he sat apart from it, felt the new tension, and was aware of the new expectancy. A moment ago Boris Waberski as he sat talking and gesticulating had been a thing for ridicule, almost for outright laughter. Now, though his voice still jumped hysterically from high notes to low notes and his body jerked like a marionette's, he held the eyes of every one—every one, that is, except Betty Harlowe. He was no longer vague. He was speaking of a definite hour and a place and of a definite incident which happened there.

"Yes, in that bad little street I see her. I do not believe my senses. I step into a little narrow alley and I peep round the corner. I peep with my eyes," and Waberski pointed to them with two of his fingers as though there was something peculiarly convincing in the fact that he peeped with them and not with his elbows, "and I am sure. Then I wait until she is out of sight, and I creep forward to see what shop it is she visited in that little street of squalor. Once more I do not believe my eyes. For over the door I read the name, Jean Cladel, Herbalist."

He pronounced the name in a voice of triumph and sat back in his chair, nodding his head violently at intervals of a second. There was not a sound in the room until Hanaud's voice broke the silence.

"I don't understand," he said softly. "Who is this Jean Cladel, and why should a young lady not visit his shop?"

"I beg your pardon," Waberski replied. "You are not of Dijon. No! or you would not have asked that question. Jean Cladel has no better name than the street he very suitably lives in. Ask a Dijonnais about Jean Cladel, and you will see how he becomes silent and shrugs his shoulders as if here was a topic on which it was becoming to be silent. Better still, Monsieur Hanaud, ask at the Prefecture. Jean Cladel! Twice he has been tried for selling prohibited drugs."

Hanaud was stung at last out of his calm.

"What is that?" he cried in a sharp voice.

"Yes, twice, Monsieur. Each time he has scraped through, that is true. He has powerful friends, and witnesses have been spirited away. But he is known! Jean Cladel! Yes, Jean Cladel!"

"Jean Cladel, Herbalist of the street Gambetta," Hanaud repeated slowly. "But"—and he leaned back in an easier attitude—"you will see my difficulty, Monsieur Waberski. Ten o'clock is a public hour. It is not a likely hour for any one to choose for so imprudent a visit, even if that one were stupid."

"Yes, and so I reasoned too," Waberski interposed quickly. "As I told you, I could not believe my eyes. But I made sure—oh, there was no doubt, Monsieur Hanaud. And I thought to myself this. Crimes are discovered because criminals, even the acutest, do sooner or later some foolish thing. Isn't it so? Sometimes they are too careful; they make their proofs too perfect for an imperfect world. Sometimes they are too careless or are driven by necessity to a rash thing. But somehow a mistake is made and justice wins the game."

Hanaud smiled.

"Aha! a student of crime, Monsieur!" He turned to Betty, and it struck upon Jim Frobisher with a curious discomfort that this was the first time Hanaud had looked directly at Betty since the interview had begun.

"And what do you say to this story, Mademoiselle?"

"It is a lie," she answered quietly.

"You did not visit Jean Cladel in the street of Gambetta at ten o'clock on the morning of the 7th of May?"

"I did not, Monsieur."

Waberski smiled and twisted his moustache.

"Of course! Of course! We could not expect Mademoiselle to admit it. One fights for one's skin, eh?"

"But, after all," Hanaud interrupted, with enough savagery in his voice to check all Waberski's complacency, "let us not forget that on the 7th of May, Madame Harlowe had been dead for ten days. Why should Mademoiselle still be going to the shop of Jean Cladel?"

"To pay," said Waberski. "Oh, no doubt Jean Cladel's wares are expensive and have to be paid for more than once, Monsieur."

"By wares you mean poison," said Hanaud. "Let us be explicit."

"Yes."

"Poison which was used to murder Madame Harlowe."

"I say so," Waberski declared, folding his arms across his breast.

"Very well," said Hanaud. He took from his green file a second paper written over in a fine hand and emphasised by an official stamp. "Then what will you say, Monsieur, if I tell you that the body of Madame Harlowe has been exhumed?" Hanaud continued, and Waberski's face lost what little colour it had. He stared at Hanaud, his jaw working up and down nervously, and he did not say a word.

"And what will you say if I tell you," Hanaud continued, "that no more morphia was discovered in it than one sleeping-dose would explain and no trace at all of any other poison?"

In a complete silence Waberski took his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead. The game was up. He had hoped to make his terms, but his bluff was called. He had not one atom of faith in his own accusation. There was but one course for him to take, and that was to withdraw his charge and plead that his affection for his sister-in-law had led him into a gross mistake. But Boris Waberski was never the man for that. He had that extra share of cunning which shipwrecks always the minor rogue. He was unwise enough to imagine that Hanaud might be bluffing too.

He drew his chair a little nearer to the table. He tittered and nodded at Hanaud confidentially.

"You say 'if I tell you,'" he said smoothly. "Yes, but you do not tell me, Monsieur Hanaud—no, not at all. On the contrary, what you say is this: 'My friend Waberski, here is a difficult matter which, if exposed, means a great scandal, and of which the issue is doubtful. There is no good in stirring the mud.'"

"Oh, I say that?" Hanaud asked, smiling pleasantly.

Waberski felt sure of his ground now.

"Yes, and more than that. You say, 'You have been badly treated, my friend Waberski, and if you will now have a little talk with that hard one your niece——'"

And his chair slid back against the bookcase and he sat gaping stupidly like a man who has been shot.

Hanaud had sprung to his feet, he stood towering above the table, his face suddenly dark with passion.

"Oh, I say all that, do I?" he thundered. "I came all the way from Paris to Dijon to preside over a little bargain in a murder case! I—Hanaud! Oh! ho! ho! I'll teach you a lesson for that! Read this!" and bending forward he thrust out the paper with the official seal. "It is the report of the analysts. Take it, I tell you, and read it!"

Waberski reached out a trembling arm, afraid to venture nearer. Even when he had the paper in his hands, they shook so he could not read it. But since he had never believed in his charge that did not matter.

"Yes," he muttered, "no doubt I have made a mistake."

Hanaud caught the word up.

"Mistake! Ah, there's a fine word! I'll show you what sort of a mistake you have made. Draw up your chair to this table in front of me! So! And take a pen—so! And a sheet of paper—so! and now you write for me a letter."

"Yes, yes," Waberski agreed. All the bravado had gone from his bearing, all the insinuating slyness. He was in a quiver from head to foot. "I will write that I am sorry."

"That is not necessary," roared Hanaud. "I will see to it that you are sorry. No! You write for me what I dictate to you and in English. You are ready? Yes? Then you begin. 'Dear Sirs.' You have that?"

"Yes, yes," said Waberski, scribbling hurriedly. His head was in a whirl. He flinched as he wrote under the towering bulk of the detective. He had as yet no comprehension of the goal to which he was being led.

"Good! 'Dear Sirs,'" Hanaud repeated. "But we want a date for that letter. April 30th, eh? That will do. The day Madame Harlowe's will was read and you found you were left no money. April 30th—put it in. So! Now we go on. 'Dear Sirs, Send me at once one thousand pounds by the recommended post, or I make some awkwardnesses——'"

Waberski dropped his pen and sprang back out of his chair.

"I don't understand—I can't write that.... There is an error—I never meant..." he stammered, his hands raised as if to ward off an attack.

"Ah, you never meant the blackmail!" Hanaud cried savagely. "Ah! Ha! Ha! It is good for you that I now know that! For when, as you put it so delicately to Mademoiselle, the moment comes for the extenuating pleas, I can rise up in the Court and urge it. Yes! I will say: 'Mr. the President, though he did the blackmail, poor fellow, he never meant it. So please to give him five years more,'" and with that Hanaud swept across the room like a tornado and flung open the door behind which Frobisher was waiting.

"Come!" he said, and he led Jim into the room. "You produce the two letters he wrote to your firm, Monsieur Frobisher. Good!"

But it was not necessary to produce them. Boris Waberski had dropped into a chair and burst into tears. There was a little movement of discomfort made by every one in that room except Hanaud; and even his anger dropped. He looked at Waberski in silence.

"You make us all ashamed. You can go back to your hotel," he said shortly. "But you will not leave Dijon, Monsieur Waberski, until it is decided what steps we shall take with you."

Waberski rose to his feet and stumbled blindly to the door.

"I make my apologies," he stammered. "It is all a mistake. I am very poor ... I meant no harm," and without looking at any one he got himself out of the room.

"That type! He at all events cannot any more think that Dijon is dull," said Hanaud, and once more he adventured on the dangerous seas of the English language. "Do you know what my friend Mister Ricardo would have said? No? I tell you. He would have said, 'That fellow! My God! What a sauce!'"

Those left in the room, Betty, Ann Upcott, and Jim Frobisher, were in a mood to welcome any excuse for laughter. The interdict upon the house was raised, the charge against Betty proved of no account, the whole bad affair was at an end. Or so it seemed. But Hanaud went quickly to the door and closed it, and when he turned back there was no laughter at all upon his face.

"Now that that man has gone," he said gravely, "I have something to tell you three which is very serious. I believe that, though Waberski does not know it, Madame Harlowe was murdered by poison in this house on the night of April the twenty-seventh."

The statement was received in a dreadful silence. Jim Frobisher stood like a man whom some calamity has stunned. Betty leaned forward in her seat with a face of horror and incredulity; and then from the arm-chair by the door where Ann Upcott was sitting there burst a loud, wild cry.

"There was some one in the house that night," she cried.

Hanaud swung round to her, his eyes blazing.

"And it is you who tell me that, Mademoiselle?" he asked in a curious, steady voice.

"Yes. It's the truth," she cried with a sort of relief in her voice, that at last a secret was out which had grown past endurance. "I am sure now. There was a stranger in the house." And though her face was white as paper, her eyes met Hanaud's without fear.

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Book

The two startling declarations, one treading upon the heels of the other, set Jim Frobisher's brain whirling. Consternation and bewilderment were all jumbled together. He had no time to ask "how," for he was already asking "What next?" His first clear thought was for Betty, and as he looked at her, a sharp anger against both Hanaud and Ann Upcott seized and shook him. Why hadn't they both spoken before? Why must they speak now? Why couldn't they leave well alone?

For Betty had fallen back in the window-seat, her hands idle at her sides and her face utterly weary and distressed. Jim thought of some stricken patient who wakes in the morning to believe for a few moments that the malady was a bad dream; and then comes the stab and the cloud of pain settles down for another day. A moment ago Betty's ordeal seemed over. Now it was beginning a new phase.

"I am sorry," he said to her.

The report of the analysts was lying on the writing-table just beneath his eyes. He took it up idly. It was a trick, of course, with its seals and its signatures, a trick of Hanaud's to force Waberski to a retraction. He glanced at it, and with an exclamation began carefully to read it through from the beginning to the end. When he had finished, he raised his head and stared at Hanaud.

"But this report is genuine," he cried. "Here are the details of the tests applied and the result. There was no trace discovered of any poison."

"No trace at all," Hanaud replied. He was not in the least disturbed by the question.

"Then I don't understand why you bring the accusation or whom you accuse," Frobisher exclaimed.

"I have accused no one," said Hanaud steadily. "Let us be clear about that! As to your other question—look!"

He took Frobisher by the elbow and led him to that bookshelf by the window before which they had stood together yesterday.

"There was an empty space here yesterday. You yourself drew my attention to it. You see that the space is filled to-day."

"Yes," said Jim.

Hanaud took down the volume which occupied the space. It was of quarto size, fairly thick and bound in a paper cover.

"Look at that," he said; and Jim Frobisher as he took it noticed with a queer little start that although Hanaud's eyes were on his face they were blank of all expression. They did not see him. Hanaud's senses were concentrated on the two girls at neither of whom he so much as glanced. He was alert to them, to any movement they might make of surprise or terror. Jim threw up his head in a sudden revolt. He was being used for another trick, as some conjurer may use a fool of a fellow whom he has persuaded out of his audience on to his platform. Jim looked at the cover of the book, and cried with enough violence to recall Hanaud's attention:

"I see nothing here to the point. It is a treatise printed by some learned society in Edinburgh."

"It is. And if you will look again, you will see that it was written by a Professor of Medicine in that University. And if you will look a third time you will see from a small inscription in ink that the copy was presented with the Professor's compliments to Mr. Simon Harlowe."

Hanaud, whilst he was speaking, went to the second of the two windows which looked upon the court and putting his head out, spoke for a little while in a low voice.

"We shall not need our sentry here any more," he said as he turned back into the room. "I have sent him upon an errand."

He went back to Jim Frobisher, who was turning over a page of the treatise here and there and was never a scrap the wiser.

"Well?" he asked.

"Strophanthus Hispidus," Jim read aloud the title of the treatise. "I can't make head or tail of it."

"Let me try!" said Hanaud, and he took the book out of Frobisher's hands. "I will show you all how I spent the half-hour whilst I was waiting for you this morning."

He sat down at the writing-table, placed the treatise on the blotting-pad in front of him and laid it open at a coloured plate.

"This is the fruit of the plant Strophanthus Hispidus, when it is ripening," he said.

The plate showed two long, tapering follicles joined together at their stems and then separating like a pair of compasses set at an acute angle. The backs of these follicles were rounded, dark in colour and speckled; the inner surfaces, however, were flat, and the curious feature of them was that, from longitudinal crevices, a number of silky white feathers protruded.

"Each of these feathers," Hanaud continued, and he looked up to find that Ann Upcott had drawn close to the table and that Betty Harlowe herself was leaning forward with a look of curiosity upon her face—"each of these feathers is attached by a fine stalk to an elliptical pod, which is the seed, and when the fruit is quite ripe and these follicles have opened so that they make a straight line, the feathers are released and the wind spreads the seed. It is wonderful, eh? See!"

Hanaud turned the pages until he came to another plate. Here a feather was represented in complete detachment from the follicle. It was outspread like a fan and was extraordinarily pretty and delicate in its texture; and from it by a stem as fine as a hair the seed hung like a jewel.

"What would you say of it, Mademoiselle?" Hanaud asked, looking up into the face of Ann Upcott with a smile. "An ornament wrought for a fine lady, by a dainty artist, eh?" and he turned the book round so that she on the opposite side of the table might the better admire the engraving.

Betty Harlowe, it seemed, was now mastered by her curiosity. Jim Frobisher, gazing down over Hanaud's shoulder at the plate and wondering uneasily whither he was being led, saw a shadow fall across the book. And there was Betty, standing by the side of her friend with the palms of her hands upon the edge of the table and her face bent over the book.

"One could wish it was an ornament, this seed of the Strophanthus Hispidus," Hanaud continued with a shake of the head. "But, alas! it is not so harmless."

He turned the book around again to himself and once more turned the pages. The smile had disappeared altogether from his face. He stopped at a third plate; and this third plate showed a row of crudely fashioned arrows with barbed heads.

Hanaud glanced up over his shoulder at Jim.

"Do you understand now the importance of this book, Monsieur Frobisher?" he asked. "No? The seeds of this plant make the famous arrow-poison of Africa. The deadliest of all the poisons since there is no antidote for it." His voice grew sombre. "The wickedest of all the poisons, since it leaves no trace."

Jim Frobisher was startled. "Is that true?" he cried.

"Yes," said Hanaud; and Betty suddenly leaned forward and pointed to the bottom of the plate.

"There is a mark there below the hilt of that arrow," she said curiously. "Yes, and a tiny note in ink."

For a moment a little gift of vision was vouchsafed to Jim Frobisher, born, no doubt, of his perplexities and trouble. A curtain was rung up in his brain. He saw no more than what was before him—the pretty group about the table in the gold of the May morning, but it was all made grim and terrible and the gold had withered to a light that was grey and deathly and cold as the grave. There were the two girls in the grace of their beauty and their youth, daintily tended, fastidiously dressed, bending their shining curls over that plate of the poison arrows like pupils at a lecture. And the man delivering the lecture, so close to them, with speech so gentle, was implacably on the trail of murder, and maybe even now looked upon one of these two girls as his quarry; was even now perhaps planning to set her in the dock of an Assize Court and send her out afterwards, carried screaming and sobbing with terror in the first grey of the morning to the hideous red engine erected during the night before the prison gates. Jim saw Hanaud the genial and friendly, as in some flawed mirror, twisted into a sinister and terrifying figure. How could he sit so close with them at the table, talk to them, point them out this and that diagram in the plates, he being human and knowing what he purposed. Jim broke in upon the lecture with a cry of exasperation.

"But this isn't a poison! This is a book about a poison. The book can't kill!"

At once Hanaud replied to him:

"Can't it?" he cried sharply. "Listen to what Mademoiselle said a minute ago. Below the hilt of this arrow marked 'Figure F,' the Professor has written a tiny note."

This particular arrow was a little different from the others in the shape of its shaft. Just below the triangular iron head the shaft expanded. It was as though the head had been fitted into a bulb; as one sees sometimes wooden penholders fine enough and tapering at the upper end, and quite thick just above the nib.

"'See page 37,'" said Hanaud, reading the Professor's note, and he turned back the pages.

"Page 37. Here we are!"

Hanaud ran a finger half-way down the page and stopped at a word in capitals.

"Figure F."

Hanaud hitched his chair a little closer to the table; Ann Upcott moved round the end of the table that she might see the better; even Jim Frobisher found himself stooping above Hanaud's shoulder. They were all conscious of a queer tension; they were expectant like explorers on the brink of a discovery. Whilst Hanaud read the paragraph aloud, it seemed that no one breathed; and this is what he read:

"'Figure F is the representation of a poison arrow which was lent to me by Simon Harlowe, Esq., of Blackman's, Norfolk, and the Maison Crenelle at Dijon. It was given to him by a Mr. John Carlisle, a trader on the Shire River in the Kombe country, and is the most perfect example of a poison arrow which I have seen. The Strophanthus seed has been pounded up in water and mixed with the reddish clay used by the Kombe natives, and the compound is thickly smeared over the head of the arrow shaft and over the actual iron dart except at the point and the edges. The arrow is quite new and the compound fresh.'"

Hanaud leaned back in his chair when he had come to the end of this paragraph.

"You see, Monsieur Frobisher, the question we have to answer. Where is to-day Simon Harlowe's arrow?"

Betty looked up into Hanaud's face.

"If it is anywhere in this house, Monsieur, it should be in the locked cabinet in my sitting-room."

"Your sitting-room?" Hanaud exclaimed sharply.

"Yes. It is what we call the Treasure Room—half museum, half living-room. My uncle Simon used it, Madame too. It was their favourite room, full of curios and beautiful things. But after Simon Harlowe died Madame would never enter it. She locked the door which communicated with her dressing-room, so that she might never even in a moment of forgetfulness enter it. The room has a door into the hall. She gave the room to me."

Hanaud's forehead cleared of its wrinkles.

"I understand," he said. "And that room is sealed."

"Yes."

"Have you ever seen the arrow, Mademoiselle?"

"Not that I remember. I only looked into the cabinet once. There are some horrible things hidden away there"; and Betty shivered and shook the recollection of them from her shoulders.

"The chances are that it's not in the house at all, that it never came back to the house," Frobisher argued stubbornly. "The Professor in all probability would have kept it."

"If he could," Hanaud rejoined. "But it's out of all probability that a collector of rare things would have allowed him to keep it. No!" and he sat for a little time in a muse. "Do you know what I am wondering?" he asked at length, and then answered his own question. "I am wondering whether after all Boris Waberski was not in the street of Gambetta on the seventh of May and close, very close, to the shop of Jean Cladel the herbalist."

"Boris! Boris Waberski," cried Jim. Was he in Hanaud's eyes the criminal? After all, why not? After all, who more likely if criminal there was, since Boris Waberski thought himself an inheritor under Mrs. Harlowe's will?

"I am wondering whether he was not doing that very thing which he attributed to you, Mademoiselle Betty," Hanaud continued.

"Paying?" Betty cried.

"Paying—or making excuses for not paying, which is more probable, or recovering the poison arrow now clean of its poison, which is most probable of all."

At last Hanaud had made an end of his secrecies and reticence. His suspicion, winged like the arrow in the plate, was flying straight to this evident mark. Jim drew a breath like a man waking from a nightmare; in all of that small company a relaxation was visible; Ann Upcott drew away from the table; Betty said softly as though speaking to herself, "Monsieur Boris! Monsieur Boris! Oh, I never thought of that!" and, to Jim's admiration there was actually a note of regret in her voice.

It was audible, too, to Hanaud, since he answered with a smile:

"But you must bring yourself to think of it, Mademoiselle. After all, he was not so gentle with you that you need show him so much good will."

A slight rush of colour tinged Betty's cheeks. Jim was not quite sure that a tiny accent of irony had not pointed Hanaud's words.

"I saw him sitting here," she replied quickly, "half an hour ago—abject—in tears—a man!" She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of distaste. "I wish him nothing worse. I was satisfied."

Hanaud smiled again with a curious amusement, an appreciation which Frobisher was quite at a loss to understand. But he had from time to time received an uneasy impression that a queer little secret duel was all this while being fought by Betty Harlowe and Hanaud underneath the smooth surface of questions and answers—a duel in which now one, now the other of the combatants got some trifling scratch. This time it seemed Betty was hurt.

"You are satisfied, Mademoiselle, but the Law is not," Hanaud returned. "Boris Waberski expected a legacy. Boris Waberski needed money immediately, as the first of the two letters which he wrote to Monsieur Frobisher's firm clearly shows. Boris Waberski had a motive." He looked from one to the other of his audience with a nod to drive the point home. "Motives, no doubt, are signposts rather difficult to read, and if one reads them amiss, they lead one very wide astray. Granted! But you must look for your signposts all the same and try to read them aright. Listen again to the Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh! He is as precise as a man can be."

Hanaud's eyes fell again upon the description of Figure F in the treatise still open upon the table in front of him.

"The arrow was the best specimen of a poison arrow which he had ever come across. The poison paste was thickly and smoothly spread over the arrow head and some inches of the shaft. The arrow was unused and the poison fresh, and these poisons retain their energy for many, many years. I tell you that if this book and this arrow were handed over to Jean Cladel, Herbalist, Jean Cladel could with ease make a solution in alcohol which injected from a hypodermic needle, would cause death within fifteen minutes and leave not one trace."

"Within fifteen minutes?" Betty asked incredulously, and from the arm-chair against the wall, where Ann Upcott had once more seated herself, there broke a startled exclamation.

"Oh!" she cried, but no one took any notice of her at all. Both Jim and Betty had their eyes fixed upon Hanaud, and he was altogether occupied in driving his argument home.

"Within fifteen minutes? How do you know?" cried Jim.

"It is written here, in the book."

"And where would Jean Cladel have learnt to handle the paste with safety, how to prepare the solution?" Jim went on.

"Here! Here! Here!" answered Hanaud, tapping with his knuckles upon the treatise. "It is all written out here—experiment after experiment made upon living animals and the action of the poison measured and registered by minutes. Oh, given a man with a working knowledge of chemicals such as Jean Cladel must possess, and the result is certain."

Betty Harlowe leaned forward again over the book and Hanaud turned it half round between them, so that both, by craning their heads, could read. He turned the pages back to the beginning and passed them quickly in review.

"See, Mademoiselle, the time tables. Strophanthus constricts the muscles of the heart like digitalis, only much more violently, much more swiftly. See the contractions of the heart noted down minute after minute, until the moment of death and all—here is the irony!—so that by means of these experiments, the poison may be transformed into a medicine and the weapon of death become an agent of life—as in good hands, it has happened." Hanaud leaned back and contemplated Betty Harlowe between his half-closed eyes. "That is wonderful, Mademoiselle. What do you think?"

Betty slowly closed the book.

"I think, Monsieur Hanaud," she said, "it is no less wonderful that you should have studied this book so thoroughly during the half-hour you waited for us here this morning."

It was Hanaud's turn to change colour. The blood mounted into his face. He was for a second or two quite disconcerted. Jim once more had a glimpse of the secret duel and rejoiced that this time it was Hanaud, the great Hanaud, who was scratched.

"The study of poisons is particularly my work," he answered shortly. "Even at the Sûrété we have to specialise nowadays," and he turned rather quickly towards Frobisher. "You are thoughtful, Monsieur?"

Jim was following out his own train of thought.

"Yes," he answered. Then he spoke to Betty.

"Boris Waberski had a latch-key, I suppose?"

"Yes," she replied.

"He took it away with him?"

"I think so."

"When are the iron gates locked?"

"It is the last thing Gaston does before he goes to bed."

Jim's satisfaction increased with every answer he received.

"You see, Monsieur Hanaud," he cried, "all this while we have been leaving out a question of importance. Who put this book back upon its shelf? And when? Yesterday at noon the space was empty. This morning it is filled. Who filled it? Last night we sat in the garden after dinner behind the house. What could have been easier than for Waberski to slip in with his latch-key at some moment when the court was empty, replace the book and slip out again unnoticed? Why——"

A gesture of Betty's brought him to a halt.

"Unnoticed? Impossible!" she said bitterly. "The police have a sergent-de-ville at our gates, night and day."

Hanaud shook his head.

"He is there no longer. After you were good enough to answer me so frankly yesterday morning the questions it was my duty to put to you, I had him removed at once."

"Why, that's true," Jim exclaimed joyfully. He remembered now that when he had driven up with his luggage from the hotel in the afternoon, the street of Charles-Robert had been quite empty. Betty Harlowe stood taken aback by her surprise. Then a smile made her face friendly; her eyes danced to the smile, and she dipped to the detective a little mock curtsy. But her voice was warm with gratitude.

"I thank you, Monsieur. I did not notice yesterday that the man had been removed, or I should have thanked you before. Indeed I was not looking for so much consideration at your hands. As I told my friend Jim, I believed that you went away thinking me guilty."

Hanaud raised a hand in protest. To Jim it was the flourish of the sword with which the duellist saluted at the end of the bout. The little secret combat between these two was over. Hanaud, by removing the sergeant from before the gates, had given a sign surely not only to Betty but to all Dijon that he found nothing to justify any surveillance of her goings out and comings in, or any limitations upon her freedom.

"Then you see," Jim insisted. He was still worrying at his solution of the case like a dog with a bone. "You see Waberski had the road clear for him last night."

Betty, however, would not have it. She shook her head vigorously.

"I won't believe that Monsieur Boris is guilty of so horrible a murder. More," and she turned her great eyes pleadingly upon Hanaud, "I don't believe that any murder was committed here at all. I don't want to believe it," and for a moment her voice faltered.

"After all, Monsieur Hanaud, what are you building this dreadful theory upon? That a book of my Uncle Simon was not in his library yesterday and is there to-day. We know nothing more. We don't know even whether Jean Cladel exists at all."

"We shall know that, Mademoiselle, very soon," said Hanaud, staring down at the book upon the table.

"We don't know whether the arrow is in the house, whether it ever was."

"We must make sure, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud stubbornly.

"And even if you had it now, here with the poison clinging in shreds to the shaft, you still couldn't be sure that the rest of it had been used. Here is a report, Monsieur, from the doctors. Because it says that no trace of the poison can be discovered, you can't infer that a poison was administered which leaves no trace. You never can prove it. You have nothing to go upon. It's all guesswork, and guesswork which will keep us living in a nightmare. Oh, if I thought for a moment that murder had been committed, I'd say, 'Go on, go on'! But it hasn't. Oh, it hasn't!"

Betty's voice rang with so evident a sincerity, there was so strong a passion of appeal, for peace, for an end of suspicion, for a right to forget and be forgotten, that Jim fancied no man could resist it. Indeed, Hanaud sat for a long while with his eyes bent upon the table before he answered her. But when at last he did, gently though his voice began, Jim knew at once that she had lost.

"You argue and plead very well, Mademoiselle Betty," he said. "But we have each of us our little creeds by which we live for better or for worse. Here is mine, a very humble one. I can discover extenuations in most crimes: even crimes of violence. Passion, anger, even greed! What are they but good qualities developed beyond the bounds? Things at the beginning good and since grown monstrous! So, too, in the execution. This or that habit of life makes natural this or that weapon which to us is hideous and abnormal and its mere use a sign of a dreadful depravity. Yes, I recognise these palliations. But there is one crime I never will forgive—murder by poison. And one criminal in whose pursuit I will never tire nor slacken, the Poisoner." Through the words there ran a real thrill of hatred, and though Hanaud's voice was low, and he never once raised his eyes from the table, he held the three who listened to him in a dreadful spell.

"Cowardly and secret, the poisoner has his little world at his mercy, and a fine sort of mercy he shows to be sure," he continued bitterly. "His hideous work is so easy. It just becomes a vice like drink, no more than that to the poisoner, but with a thousand times the pleasure drink can give. Like the practice of some abominable art. I tell you the truth now! Show me one victim to-day and the poisoner scot-free, and I'll show you another victim before the year's out. Make no mistake! Make no mistake!"

His voice rang out and died away. But the words seemed still to vibrate in the air of that room, to strike the walls and rebound from them and still be audible. Jim Frobisher, for all his slow imagination, felt that had a poisoner been present and heard them, some cry of guilt must have rent the silence and betrayed him. His heart stopped in its beats listening for a cry, though his reason told him there was no mouth in that room from which the cry could come.

Hanaud looked up at Betty when he had finished. He begged her pardon with a little flutter of his hands and a regretful smile. "You must take me, therefore, as God made me, Mademoiselle, and not blame me more than you can help for the distress I still must cause you. There was never a case more difficult. Therefore never one about which one way or the other I must be more sure."

Before Betty could reply there came a knock upon the door.

"Come in," Hanaud cried out, and a small, dark, alert man in plain clothes entered the room.

"This is Nicolas Moreau, who was keeping watch in the courtyard. I sent him some while ago upon an errand," he explained and turned again to Moreau.

"Well, Nicolas?"

Nicolas stood at attention, with his hands at the seams of his trousers, in spite of his plain clothes, and he recited rather than spoke in a perfectly expressionless official voice.

"In accordance with instructions I went to the shop of Jean Cladel. It is number seven. From the Rue Gambetta I went to the Prefecture. I verified your statement. Jean Cladel has twice appeared before the Police Correctionelle for selling forbidden drugs and has twice been acquitted owing to the absence of necessary witnesses."

"Thank you, Nicolas."

Moreau saluted, turned on his heel, and went out of the room. There followed a moment of silence, of discouragement. Hanaud looked ruefully at Betty.

"You see! I must go on. We must search in that locked cabinet of Simon Harlowe's for the poison arrow, if by chance it should be there."

"The room is sealed," Frobisher reminded him.

"We must have those seals removed," he replied, and he took his watch from his pocket and screwed up his face in grimace.

"We need Monsieur the Commissary, and Monsieur the Commissary will not be in a good humour if we disturb him now. For it is twelve o'clock, the sacred hour of luncheon. You will have observed upon the stage that Commissaries of Police are never in a good humour. It is because——" But Hanaud's audience was never to hear his explanation of this well-known fact. For he stopped with a queer jerk of his voice, his watch still dangling from his fingers upon its chain. Both Jim and Betty looked at once where he was looking. They saw Ann Upcott standing up against the wall with her hand upon the top rail of a chair to prevent herself from falling. Her eyes were closed, her whole face a mask of misery. Hanaud was at her side in a moment.

"Mademoiselle," he asked with a breathless sort of eagerness, "what is it you have to tell me?"

"It is true, then?" she whispered. "Jean Cladel exists?"

"Yes."

"And the poison arrow could have been used?" she faltered, and the next words would not be spoken, but were spoken at the last. "And death would have followed in fifteen minutes?"

"Upon my oath it is true," Hanaud insisted. "What is it you have to tell me?"

"That I could have hindered it all. I shall never forgive myself. I could have hindered the murder."

Hanaud's eyes narrowed as he watched the girl. Was he disappointed, Frobisher wondered? Did he expect quite another reply? A swift movement by Betty distracted him from these questions. He saw Betty looking across the room at them with the strangest glittering eyes he had ever seen. And then Ann Upcott drew herself away from Hanaud and stood up against the wall at her full height with her arms outstretched. She seemed to be setting herself apart as a pariah; her whole attitude and posture cried, "Stone me! I am waiting."

Hanaud put his watch into his pocket.

"Mademoiselle, we will let the Commissary eat his luncheon in peace, and we will hear your story first. But not here. In the garden under the shade of the trees." He took his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. "Indeed I too feel the heat. This room is as hot as an oven."

When Jim Frobisher looked back in after time upon the incidents of that morning, nothing stood out so vividly in his memories, no, not even the book of arrows and its plates, not Hanaud's statement of his creed, as the picture of him twirling his watch at the end of his chain, whilst it sparkled in the sunlight and he wondered whether he should break in now upon the Commissaire of Police or let him eat his luncheon in quiet. So much that was then unsuspected by them all, hung upon the exact sequence of events.

CHAPTER NINE: The Secret

The garden chairs were already set out upon a lawn towards the farther end of the garden in the shadow of the great trees. Hanaud led the way towards them.

"We shall be in the cool here and with no one to overhear us but the birds," he said, and he patted and arranged the cushions in a deep arm-chair of basket work for Ann Upcott. Jim Frobisher was reminded again of the solicitude of a doctor with an invalid and again the parallel jarred upon him. But he was getting a clearer insight into the character of this implacable being. The little courtesies and attentions were not assumed. They were natural, but they would not hinder him for a moment in his pursuit. He would arrange the cushions with the swift deft hands of a nurse—yes, but he would slip the handcuffs on the wrists of his invalid, a moment afterwards, no less deftly and swiftly, if thus his duty prompted him.

"There!" he said. "Now, Mademoiselle, you are comfortable. For me, if I am permitted, I shall smoke."

He turned round to ask for permission of Betty, who with Jim had followed into the garden behind him.

"Of course," she answered; and coming forward, she sat down in another of the chairs.

Hanaud pulled out of a pocket a bright blue bundle of thin black cigarettes and lit one. Then he sat in a chair close to the two girls. Jim Frobisher stood behind Hanaud. The lawn was dappled with sunlight and cool shadows. The blackbird and the thrush were calling from bough and bush, the garden was riotous with roses and the air sweet with their perfume. It was a strange setting for the eerie story which Ann Upcott had to tell of her adventures in the darkness and silence of a night; but the very contrast seemed to make the story still more vivid.

"I did not go to Monsieur de Pouillac's Ball on the night of April the 27th," she began, and Jim started, so that Hanaud raised his hand to prevent him interrupting. He had not given a thought to where Ann Upcott had been upon that night. To Hanaud, however, the statement brought no surprise.

"You were not well?" he asked.

"It wasn't that," Ann replied. "But Betty and I had—I won't say a rule, but a sort of working arrangement which I think had been in practice ever since I came to the Maison Crenelle. We didn't encroach upon each other's independence."

The two girls had recognised from their first coming together that privacy was the very salt of companionship. Each had a sanctuary in her own sitting-room.

"I don't think Betty has ever been in mine, I only once or twice in hers," said Ann. "We had each our own friends. We didn't pester each other with questions as to where we had been and with whom. In a word, we weren't all the time shadows upon each other's heels."

"A wise rule, Mademoiselle," Hanaud agreed cordially. "A good many households are split from roof to cellar by the absence of just such a rule. The de Pouillacs then were Mademoiselle Betty's friends."

"Yes. As soon as Betty had gone," Ann resumed, "I told Gaston that he might turn off the lights and go to bed whenever he liked; and I went upstairs to my own sitting-room, which is next to my bedroom. You can see the windows from here. There!"

They were in a group facing the back of the long house across the garden. To the right of the hall stretched the line of shuttered windows, with Betty's bedroom just above. Ann pointed to the wing on the left of the hall and towards the road.

"I see. You are above the library, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud.

"Yes. I had a letter to write," Ann continued, and suddenly faltered. She had come upon some obstacle in the telling of her story which she had forgotten when she had uttered her cry in the library. She gasped. "Oh!" she murmured, and again "Oh!" in a low voice. She glanced anxiously at Betty, but she got no help from her at all. Betty was leaning forward with her elbows upon her knees and her eyes on the grass at her feet and apparently miles away in thought.

"Yes, Mademoiselle," Hanaud asked smoothly.

"It was an important letter," Ann went on again, choosing her words warily, much as yesterday at one moment in her interrogatory Betty herself had done—concealing something, too, just as Betty had done. "I had promised faithfully to write it. But the address was downstairs in Betty's room. It was the address of a doctor," and having said that, it seemed that she had cleared her obstacle, for she went on in a more easy and natural tone.

"You know what it is, Monsieur Hanaud. I had been playing tennis all the afternoon. I was pleasantly tired. There was a letter to be written with a good deal of care and the address was all the way downstairs. I said to myself that I would think out the terms of my letter first."

And here Jim Frobisher, who had been shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, broke in upon the narrative.

"But what was this letter about and to what doctor?" he asked.

Hanaud swung round almost angrily.

"Oh, please!" he cried. "These things will all come to light of themselves in their due order, if we leave them alone and keep them in our memories. Let Mademoiselle tell her story in her own way," and he was back at Ann Upcott again in a flash.

"Yes, Mademoiselle. You determined to think out the tenor of your letter."

A hint of a smile glimmered upon the girl's face for a second. "But it was an excuse really, an excuse to sit down in my big arm-chair, stretch out my legs and do nothing at all. You can guess what happened."

Hanaud smiled and nodded.

"You fell fast asleep. Conscience does not keep young people, who are healthy and tired, awake," he said.

"No, but it wakes up with them," Ann returned, "and upbraids at once bitterly. I woke up rather chilly, as people do who have gone to sleep in their chairs. I was wearing a little thin frock of pale blue tulle—oh, a feather-weight of a frock! Yes, I was cold and my conscience was saying, 'Oh, big lazy one! And your letter? Where is it?'

"In a moment I was standing up and the next I was out of the room on the landing, and I was still half dazed with sleep. I closed my door behind me. It was just chance that I did it. The lights were all out on the staircase and in the hall below. The curtains were drawn across the windows. There was no moon that night. I was in a darkness so complete that I could not see the glimmer of my hand when I raised it close before my face."

Hanaud let the end of his cigarette drop at his feet. Betty had raised her face and was staring at Ann with her mouth parted. For all of them the garden had disappeared with its sunlight and its roses and its singing birds. They were upon that staircase with Ann Upcott in the black night. The swift changes of colour in her cheeks and of expression in her eyes—the nervous vividness of her compelled them to follow with her.

"Yes, Mademoiselle?" said Hanaud quietly.

"The darkness didn't matter to me," she went on, with an amazement at her own fearlessness, now that she knew the after-history of that evening. "I am afraid now. I wasn't then," and Jim remembered how the night before in the garden her eyes had shifted from this dark spot to that in search of an intruder. Certainly she was afraid now! Her hands were clenched tight upon the arms of her chair, her lips shook.

"I knew every tread of the stairs. My hand was on the balustrade. There was no sound. It never occurred to me that any one was awake except myself. I did not even turn on the light in the hall by the switch at the bottom of the stairs. I knew that there was a switch just inside the door of Betty's room, and that was enough. I think, too, that I didn't want to rouse anybody. At the foot of the stairs I turned right like a soldier. Exactly opposite to me across the hall was the door of Betty's room. I crossed the hall with my hands out in front of me," and Betty, as though she herself were crossing the hall, suddenly thrust both her hands out in front of her.

"Yes, one would have to do that," she said slowly. "In the dark—with nothing but space in front of one—— Yes!" and then she smiled as she saw that Hanaud's eyes were watching her curiously. "Don't you think so, Monsieur Hanaud?"

"No doubt," said he. "But let us not interrupt Mademoiselle."

"I touched the wall first," Ann resumed, "just at the angle of the corridor and the hall."

"The corridor with the windows on to the courtyard on the one side and the doors of the receptions on the other?" Hanaud asked.

"Yes."

"Were the curtains drawn across all those windows too, Mademoiselle?"

"Yes. There was not a glimmer of light anywhere. I felt my way along the wall to my right—that is, in the hall, of course, not the corridor—until my hands slipped off the surface and touched nothing. I had reached the embrasure of the doorway. I felt for the door-knob, turned it and entered the room. The light switch was in the wall at the side of the door, close to my left hand. I snapped it down. I think that I was still half asleep when I turned the light on in the treasure-room, as we called it. But the next moment I was wide awake—oh, I have never been more wide awake in my life. My fingers indeed were hardly off the switch after turning the light on, before they were back again turning the light off. But this time I eased the switch up very carefully, so that there should be no snap—no, not the tiniest sound to betray me. There was so short an interval between the two movements of my hand that I had just time to notice the clock on the top of the marquetry cabinet in the middle of the wall opposite to me, and then once more I stood in darkness, but stock still and holding my breath—a little frightened—yes, no doubt a little frightened, but more astonished than frightened. For in the inner wall of the room, at the other end, close by the window, there,"—and Ann pointed to the second of those shuttered windows which stared so blankly on the garden—"the door which was always locked since Simon Harlowe's death stood open and a bright light burned beyond."

Betty Harlowe uttered a little cry.

"That door?" she exclaimed, now at last really troubled. "It stood open? How can that have been?"

Hanaud shifted his position in his chair, and asked her a question.

"On which side of the door was the key, Mademoiselle?"

"On Madame's, if the key was in the lock at all."

"Oh! You don't remember whether it was?"

"No," said Betty. "Of course both Ann and I were in and out of Madame's bedroom when she was ill, but there was a dressing-room between the bedroom and the communicating door of my room, so that we should not have noticed."

"To be sure," Hanaud agreed. "The dressing-room in which the nurse might have slept and did when Madame had a seizure. Do you remember whether the communicating door was still open or unlocked on the next morning?"

Betty frowned and reflected, and shook her head.

"I cannot remember. We were all in great trouble. There was so much to do. I did not notice."

"No. Indeed why should you?" said Hanaud. He turned back to Ann. "Before you go on with this curious story, Mademoiselle, tell me this! Was the light beyond the open door, a light in the dressing-room or in the room beyond the dressing-room, Madame Harlowe's bedroom, or didn't you notice?"

"In the far room, I think," Ann answered confidently. "There would have been more light in the treasure-room otherwise. The treasure-room is long no doubt, but where I stood I was completely in darkness. There was only this panel of yellow light in the open doorway. It lay in a band straight across the carpet and it lit up the sedan chair opposite the doorway until it all glistened like silver."

"Oho, there is a sedan chair in that museum?" said Hanaud lightly. "It will be interesting to see. So the light, Mademoiselle, came from the far room?"

"The light and—and the voices," said Ann with a quaver in her throat.

"Voices!" cried Hanaud. He sat up straight in his chair, whilst Betty Harlowe went as white as a ghost. "Voices! What is this? Did you recognise those voices?"

"One, Madame's. There was no mistaking it. It was loud and violent for a moment. Then it went off into a mumble of groans. The other voice only spoke once and very few words and very clearly. But it spoke in a whisper. There was too a sound of—movements."

"Movements!" said Hanaud sharply; and with his voice his face seemed to sharpen too. "Here's a word which does not help us much. A procession moves. So does the chair if I push it. So does my hand if I cover a mouth and stop a cry. Is it that sort of movement you mean, Mademoiselle?"

Under the stern insistence of his questions Ann Upcott suddenly weakened.

"Oh, I am afraid so," she said with a loud cry, and she clapped her hands to her face. "I never understood until this morning when you spoke of how the arrow might be used. Oh, I shall never forgive myself. I stood in the darkness, a few yards away—no more—I stood quite still and listened and just beyond the lighted doorway Madame was being killed!" She drew her hands from her face and beat upon her knees with her clenched fists in a frenzy.

"'Yes, I believe that now!' Madame cried in the hoarse, harsh voice we knew: 'Stripped, eh? Stripped to the skin!' and she laughed wildly; and then came the sound, as though—yes, it might have been that!—as though she were forced down and held, and Madame's voice died to a mumble and then silence—and then the other voice in a low clear whisper, 'That will do now.' And all the while I stood in the darkness—oh!"

"What did you do after that clear whisper reached your ears?" Hanaud commanded. "Take your hands from your face, if you please, and let me hear."

Ann Upcott obeyed him. She flung her head back with the tears streaming down her face.

"I turned," she whispered. "I went out of the room. I closed the door behind me—oh, ever so gently. I fled."

"Fled? Fled? Where to?"

"Up the stairs! To my room."

"And you rang no bell? You roused no one? You fled to your room! You hid your head under the bed-clothes like a child! Come, come, Mademoiselle!"

TheHouse of the Arrow

CHAPTER ONE: Letters of Mark

CHAPTER TWO: A Cry for Help

CHAPTER THREE: Servants of Chance

CHAPTER FOUR: Betty Harlowe

CHAPTER FIVE: Betty Harlowe Answers

CHAPTER SIX: Jim Changes His Lodging

CHAPTER SEVEN: Exit Waberski

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Book

CHAPTER NINE: The Secret

The
House of the Arrow